Quick Facts
- Name
- Joseph Merrick
- Birth Date
- August 5, 1862
- Death Date
- April 11, 1890
- Place of Birth
- Leicester, England
- Place of Death
- London, England
- Full Name
- Joseph Carey Merrick
Best
known as the "Elephant Man," Joseph Carey Merrick has been the subject
of many medical studies, documentaries, and works of fiction.
Synopsis
Joseph
Carey Merrick was born on August 5, 1862, in Leicester, England. At a
young age he began to develop physical deformities that became so
extreme that he was forced to become a resident of a workhouse at age
17. Seeking to escape the workhouse several years later, Merrick found
his way into a human oddities show in which he was exhibited as "The
Elephant Man."
After an unsuccessful trip to Belgium, Merrick returned
to London and was eventually brought to the London Hospital. Unable to
care for Merrick, the chairman of the hospital published a letter asking
for public support. The resulting donations allowed the hospital to
convert several rooms into living quarters for Merrick, where he would
be cared for the rest of his life. He died of asphyxiation on April 11,
1890, at the age of 27.
A Healthy Child
Joseph
Carey Merrick was born on August 5, 1862, in Leicester, England, and
was by all accounts a healthy child at birth. However, by the age of 5,
he had developed patches of lumpy, grayish skin, which his parents
attributed to his mother having been frightened by a stampeding elephant
during her pregnancy.
As Merrick grew older, he developed more severe
deformities, until head and body were covered with various bony and
fleshy tumors. Yet despite these infirmities, Merrick had a relatively
normal childhood and attended the local school.
The Greatest Sadness in His Life
In
1873, when Merrick was just 11 years old, his mother died of bronchial
pneumonia. Merrick would later describe her passing as the “greatest
sadness in my life.”
His father remarried to their landlady less than a
year later, and Merrick left school to seek work, eventually finding a
job rolling cigars in a factory. But within two years, his right hand
had become so deformed that he could no longer do the work and was
forced to leave.
His father, who owned a haberdashery, attained a
peddler’s license for him and sent him out to the streets to sell his
shop’s wares. By this point, however, Merrick’s deformities were so
extreme, and his speech so impaired as a result, that people were either
frightened of him or unable to understand him, and his efforts were met
with little success.
When one day his father beat him severely for not
earning enough money, Merrick went to live with an uncle briefly, before
becoming a resident at the Leicester Union Workhouse at age 17. Merrick
found life in the workhouse intolerable, but unable to find any other
means of supporting himself, he was forced to stay.
In
1884, Merrick decided to try to profit from his deformities and escape
life in the workhouse. He contacted Sam Torr, the proprietor of a
Leicester music hall called the Gaiety Palace of Varieties, and they
devised a plan to secure him a spot in a human oddities show.
Merrick
was soon exhibited as “The Elephant Man, Half-Man, Half-Elephant” to
great success in Leicester and Nottingham before eventually traveling to
London that November. He wore a cape and veil to conceal his
deformities in public, but was often harassed by mobs as he traveled.
In
London, the Elephant Man exhibit was housed across the street from the
London Hospital and was frequently visited by medical students and
doctors interested in Merrick’s condition. Merrick was eventually
invited by a surgeon named Frederick Treves to visit the hospital to be
examined.
The results of Treves’s examination show that, by that point,
Merrick’s deformities had become extreme. His head measured 36 inches in
circumference, and his right hand 12 inches at the wrist. His body was
covered with tumors, and his legs and hip were so deformed that he had
to walk with a cane. He was found to be in otherwise good health.
Treves
presented Merrick to the Pathological Society of London in December of
that year, and asked Merrick to visit the hospital for further
examination, but Merrick refused, later recalling that the experience
made him feel like “an animal in a cattle market.”
To Belgium and Back
By
1885, a distaste for freak shows had developed in Britain and Merrick
and his managers decided to try to move the Elephant Man exhibit to
Belgium. The show met with only mediocre success, however, and Merrick’s
manager there eventually robbed him of his life savings and abandoned
him.
After finding passage on a ship back to England in June of 1886,
Merrick was mobbed by a crowd at Liverpool Street Station in London and
taken into custody by the police. Unable to understand Merrick, they
eventually found Frederick Treves’s business card on him and took him to
the London Hospital. Treves examined Merrick at the hospital and found
that his condition had severely deteriorated in the previous two years.
However, the hospital was considered incapable of caring for
“incurables” such as him, and it seemed that Merrick would be forced to
fend for himself yet again.
A Home
When
the chairman of the London Hospital, Carr Gromm, was unable to find
another hospital to care for Merrick, he decided to publish a letter in
the The Times describing Merrick’s case and asking for help. Gromm’s
letter resulted in a sympathetic public outpouring and enough financial
donations to provide Merrick with a home for the rest of his life, and
in 1887, several rooms in the London Hospital were converted to living
quarters for him.
Merrick’s notoriety also resulted in his being visited
by members of the British upper class, most notably the actress Madge
Kendall, with whom he developed a special rapport, and Alexandra the
Princess of Wales. Merrick was able to visit the theater on at least one
occasion, and made trips to the countryside several times over the next
few years.
When he was at home, he spent his time conversing with
Treves (one of the few people who could understand him) or writing prose
and poetry. He also built an elaborate cathedral made out of playing
cards for Madge Kendall.
Decline and Death
Despite
Merrick’s newfound support structure, his condition continued to worsen
during his time at the London Hospital. On April 11, 1890, Merrick was
discovered dead, lying face down on his bed. Due to the size of his
head, he had for his whole life slept sitting up, with his head resting
against his knees. It was determined that Merrick had died of
asphyxiation after suffering either stroke or a heart attack that caused
him to fall in his bed, from which he was unable to get up. He was 27
years old.
Science and Fiction
After
Merrick’s passing, Treves had plaster casts made of his body and
preserved his skeleton, which has been kept on permanent display in the
collections of the London Hospital. (It has been reported that pop
singer Michael Jackson
once tried to purchase Merrick’s bones but was refused by the hospital
out of respect for Merrick.) Despite Merrick’s own belief that his
deformities had indeed been the result of his mother’s encounter with an
elephant, the actual causes have been a subject of much discussion
since his death. Initially considered to be the result of elephantiasis,
the disorder is now thought to be either an extremely severe case of
neurofibromatosis and/or the result of a disease known as Proteus syndrome.
The life of Joseph Carey Merrick has also been
the subject of various artistic interpretations as well. In 1979, a
play by Bernard Pomerance called The Elephant Man debuted on Broadway.
In later productions of the play, the part of Merrick was played by the likes of David Bowie and Mark Hamill. The following year, an unrelated film of the same name was released. Directed by David Lynch and with John Hurt in the role of Merrick and Anthony Hopkins
in the role of Treves, the film tells a mostly accurate version of the
events of Merrick’s life. In 2014, a revival production of The Elephant Man starring Bradley Cooper brought Pomerance’s play, and Merrick’s story, back to Broadway.
