It is a story with sad overtones but deeply human that of the young man Joseph Merrickknown in nineteenth-century Victorian England in London as “Elephant Man” due to the genetic disease that deformed much of his body since he was a child. Thrown out of the house by his austere stepmother, he ended up by chance in the area of the freak show, the sideshow phenomena of London, where people were willing to pay a lot of money to see him. Born in August 1862 in Leicester, he died in the English capital on April 11, 1890, a few months before turning 28.
The American director David Lynchdeeply fascinated by Merrick, in 1980 he made a biopic to tell the world the story of a young man who always felt like a Frankenstein, but who was nothing more than a man like many others, longing to love and be loved.
Joseph Merrick’s Childhood and His Beginnings with the Freak Show
Already shortly before he turned 5 it was clear that something was wrong, because his body had started to change: first of all his lips had swollen, so much so that it was increasingly difficult for him to make himself understood by people. Then it was the turn of his right arm and legs, and as time went by his skin had become thick and lumpy (due to fibrous skin tumors) slightly gray, like that of an elephant, in fact. Only his left arm and genitals remained normal for the rest of his life. As if bad luck with him had not already seen well enough, he happened to fall and hurt his hip, but since his parents were very poor the fracture was not treated, and from then on he began to limp. Merrick’s childhood, however, worsened at the age of 11, when his mother died and his father remarried a woman who found him repulsive. At 13 he began to work as a cigar rollerbut after three years his right hand would not allow him to continue, and so he began selling shoe polish on the street. But people avoided him, and when he did not bring home any money, in 1877 his father threw him out.
For a while he was hosted by his uncle and continued to be a street vendor, then that period also ended. In 1882 he underwent surgery on his face to remove much of the mass that had grown on his lips and to be able to speak again.
The turning point came when he decided to write a business letter to one of the comedians of the freak show of Leicester. He was immediately asked to join the freak show, and Merrick accepted. The exhibitors advertised him as “half man, half elephant”, and the visitors were not long in coming. Little by little he became known throughout London as “Elephant Man” and for him began a period of good earnings.
The rare disease makes him meet Dr. Treves
Merrick, who in the meantime had begun working in the London freak show, where the exhibitor Tom Norman he thought he was too ugly to perform on stage, and had him perform in an empty shop on Whitechapel Road. One evening, seeing Merrick asleep in his bed inside the shop, Norman noticed that the boy was sleeping sitting up, with his legs raised and his head resting on his knees. This position was the only one possible for him, because if he slept lying down with the weight of his head he would have risked waking up in the afterlife. In the meantime the boy saved up his fee with the dream of buying a little house for himself.
The shop was right in front of the London Hospitalwhere he worked Dr. Frederick Treves. In 1923 Treves went to the shop at the suggestion of a colleague who had told him about a strangely deformed man known as the “Elephant Man,” and the doctor asked Merrick to come to his office for a more thorough examination. Despite corrective surgery on his mouth in 1882, his lips had grown back, and it was almost impossible to understand what he was saying, but the doctor concluded that despite the deformities now present almost everywhere on his body, the patient was healthy.
In the following two years he had left for a tour in Europebut his new manager ran off with his fee, and when he tried to board the ferry to Dover he was refused entry because of his appearance. He soon managed to board a ship to Essex, and travelled by train to London. He had no place to stay, however, because in 1886 the freak shows were declared illegal by the British Government because of the disturbance caused by the surrounding crowd and other unpleasant events that occurred within it and were gradually closed down. Tired and disconsolate, in a language almost impossible to understand, he managed to make himself understood by a policeman by passing him a business card of Dr. Treves. The doctor went to get him and took him to the London Hospital, where he was treated.
Treves spent a lot of time with the patient, and realized – as he wrote in his notebook of reminiscences – that he was a boy very sensitive and inclined to show his emotions. One of the patient’s greatest afflictions was the idea that he would never have contact with a woman, because they had always looked at him as if he were a monster. Treves also wrote in his memoirs that Merrick hoped one day to move to an institution for the blind where find a woman who wasn’t afraid to be with himThe doctor, who had by now become very fond of the boy, arranged a friendly meeting for him with an old friend of hers, which did not last long, but had a reinvigorating effect on his self-esteem: Mrs. Leila Maturin She treated him with kindness and courtesy, and gave him a book and two grouse. In thanks, Merrick also wrote her a letter (with his left hand).
Three times the boy left the hospital and travelled by train to the Northamptonshire countryside. There he stayed in a cottage with the gamekeeper of the host estate, and was very happy. He spent his time walking with him and picking flowers. In a letter to Treves the gamekeeper said that the young man was a very kind, interesting and educated man, with whom it was a pleasure to spend time.
The premature death
The holidays in the country, the company of the doctor and some of his friends who came to visit him in the hospital and the excellent care had a positive impact on the young man’s life. Unfortunately, his health worsened in the fourth year of hospitalization: the facial deformities had grown a lot in his last months of life, and his head was increasingly large and heavy. In an attempt to feel like the others, on the night of April 11, 1890 he tried to sleep lying down, but it was fatal. Merrick died of asphyxiation before he even turned 28.
After the autopsy, a cast was made of his face and limbs and skin samples were taken. His skeleton was then mounted and donated to science by decision of Dr. Treves: it is still in a glass case today at the Royal London Hospitalin the pathological cases section, where medical students can come in to observe and study him by appointment.
Over time it was discovered that all those deformities were caused by the Proteus Syndromea very rare disease that causes a uncontrolled growth of various body parts and skin full of buboes and fibrous tumors. From 1979 to today there have been only 200 cases in the world of this syndrome, which is not hereditary but is incurable. The name, given to her in 1996 by a doctor at the Royal London Hospital, was not chosen by chance: Proteus was a Greek sea god who could transform his physical appearance and become part of nature or an animal. It was precisely this transformation that sent her back to this pathological condition.
In 1980 the director David Lynchstruck by his story, decided to shoot the biopic “Elephant man“. Towards the end Merrick takes off his hood and lets himself be observed: it is Lynch’s sign, who wants to remove the veil that divides the protagonist from the world, making him worthy of love like all human beings.
