December 15, 2020 • 43 mins
Joseph Merrick was known as The Elephant Man because of his suffering from what we now know was Proteus Synrome. Learn all about this brave man in today's episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry's
out there floating in the ether like the omniscient green goddess,
salad dressing that she is. This is stuff you should know.
(00:26):
Why do you work on that, buddy? That is off
the cuff? Don't you know me? By now? Off the dome?
As they say, I don't see that. I say off
the cuff. It's not cool enough to say off the dome.
But you're shirtless, so there is no cuff. That's that
is true? Man, I hadn't thought about all this. Maybe
I should changed off the dome. Speaking of domes, Chuck, Yeah,
(00:47):
what were you gonna say? I was going to talk
about Thunderdome? Were you really? I'm always this close to
talking about Thunderdome? Yeah. I guess that's that's a pretty
way to be, isn't it. Sure? So who's who? Chuck?
Am I master or blaster? And are you master or blaster?
Are we both blaster and both master? I'm not sure
(01:08):
who was who? But I would prefer to ride around
on your shoulders. That's fine. I prefer to be a
giant shirtless man wearing nothing but a leather daddy across
belt across my chest, which I guess I could probably
do that anyway. You know, why not, I'm Tina Turner.
Oh so you're Tina Turner writing on blasters shoulders? Yes,
(01:31):
what happened to master? Uh? That was? That was? We
don't like to talk about it. Two men entered, that's
all I'll say. Okay, he was suffocated by Tina Turner
sitting on him. That's right. So UM, obviously, Chuck, we're
talking about one of the most in my opinion, admirable,
brave human beings to ever walk the face of the earth. UM,
(01:55):
and a man named Joseph Merrick, who a lot of
people UM no of his John Merrick incorrectly, but probably know.
I'm even better as the elephant man. That's right. And uh,
you know we have to use those words because that's
how he was referred to. Um. We'll get into the
reasons why, but we're gonna call him Joseph Merrick mainly
(02:19):
because that's the man's name, and we don't like to
to call somebody by their sideshow name. It's a rule here, sure, no,
but it should be noted that um, he was uh
And it's really I think a lot of people probably
don't realize this, but he um was an active, willing
and initiating participant, founding member, you could say, of his
(02:40):
own sideshow act. Um. So he was fully on board
with the idea of being called the elephant man um,
which is just another facet of this extremely complex person,
you know who. I think it's painted with a very
simple brush sometimes. But the great thing is is a
lot of times when you when you look into a
widely misunderstood, wildly oversimplified person, you very frequently find that
(03:08):
there's a lot of like really terrible stuff to them,
Like they you know, like, um, they were fine with
with hitting women. They thought that that was like a
totally fine thing to do, like Sean Connery, right, and instead, Um,
when you look into Joseph Merrick, you find, oh my gosh,
like he was even he was an even better person
than I I dared hope, you know, like he was
(03:29):
a really great guy who went through just hell on
Earth in the twenty seven years that he was alive. Yeah. So, um,
you may have heard of the story of the Elephant
Man from UM a few things in pop culture, namely
the David Lynch movie UM or perhaps the various Broadway
(03:50):
shows UM. I watched a few of those, like clips
from a few of those. He's been played by David Bowie,
Billy Crudup, recently by Bradley Cooper, and I was kind
of Bradley Cooper said that the movie caused him to
want to become an actor, so it's actually pretty apropos
that he played him. Eventually, Well, we can all thank
(04:11):
Joseph Merrick for Bradley Cooper's success, That's right. But yeah,
I was kind of curious because I was like, did
they undergo prosthetics? Like how do they pull this off?
But UM, I'm sure you looked at some of the clips.
No one does that. When you play Joseph Merrick. You
just embodied the man. You um, sort of contort your
(04:32):
body in certain ways and you just sort of play
the person. And I think that's a good way to
go about it, rather than just you know, throwing some
uh some big mask over David Bowie or something like that. Right. Yeah, Yeah,
they just kind of contorted their body, they altered their
speech and just affected they like they Yeah, I think
(04:56):
it was a good way to go to And apparently
I don't remember the guy's name, but the guy the
first guy to play Joseph Merrick in the stage version
and when that came out and I think seventy nine
or eighty, Um, he he was the one who started
that trend and really kind of came up with this
this embodiment that everybody else has has kind of followed
suit with afterwards. And I don't know, I didn't catch it.
(05:17):
Did you say Mark Hamill was one of the people
who played him, Yeah, Luke Skywalker he uh yeah, he
used the force, he did. So there's something really weird
that happened in the late seventies, and I am not
quite sure what it was. But in nineteen seventy nine,
the stage play based on Joseph Merritt came out. In
(05:38):
nineteen eighty, David Lynch released the Just the legendary film,
one of the best films ever made about um Joseph Merrick.
And then there was a definitive book that was written
as well by a pair of authors. Um, one of
whom I believe was like a doctor who had like
all this great research, but his writing was a little
(05:59):
over the top, so they assigned a ghostwriter with him,
and they basically wrote the definitive book on Joseph Merrick's life,
UM and medical condition. And all three of these projects
happened independently, like one wasn't adapted from the other or
anything like that, and they all came out at around
the same time, which is really strange in and of itself.
(06:19):
But it's even stranger to think that all of this
happened um centered on a character who had been largely
forgotten by this time, you know, like there was really
only two surviving um pieces of literature about him, about
Joseph Merrick, the man um that that that anyone was
(06:39):
aware of, and they had been written in the nineteenth century.
But then suddenly, for some reason in the late seventies,
three different projects started up about Joseph American kind of
made him a icon for humanity that is still, you know,
lasting today. Yeah. I think the seventies spawned Disco Fever
and Elephant man Fever. Sorry, and they were both rather
(07:02):
unlikely considering uh, both Disco and Joseph Merrick were born
in the eighteen hundreds, specifically in England on August five,
eighteen sixty two. So I meant to look it up.
I don't know if it's Is it Leicestershire like the
sauce Leicester Lester Lester? Right, yeah, you have that last time.
It's just Lester from what I understand. Okay, So he
(07:25):
was born in Leicester, England, on August five, eighteen sixty two.
And UM, we'll talk a little bit about what they
are pretty sure his condition was. But being eighteen sixty
two at the time, Um, after he started developing, um,
some very strange symptoms at the age of five, doctors
back then we're pretty flummixed. Yeah, yes, yeah, So. UM.
(07:50):
The reason why is, we'll see, is because they think
he's one of maybe a hundred people in the entire
history of the world, or at least as far as
people have been writing stuff like this down on um,
to have this condition that he had. So it's not
like he started developing strangely and they were like, oh, well,
you know, this is what's going on, this is what's
(08:11):
to be expected. Instead, just a little by little his
body started taking on these odd differing forms. Um. And
like you said, I think it was around the age
of five that he really started to to show that
he was going to be rather different. Yeah, it was five.
His father Joseph and his mother Mary Jane noticed he
(08:32):
had swollen lips, and then a lump started to form
on his forehead. His skin started to kind of get
loose and rough. Um, And this was just sort of
the beginning. His face became spongy, his jaw started to deform,
his speech was impaired. Um. The right side of his
body was, or at least upper body was a little
(08:54):
more or I guess a lot more affected, because it
seemed like his left arm in hand stayed kind of
as is, but the right side arm became sort of
like this giant fin right. So. Um. The the thing
that I guess kind of gave him the moniker the
elephant man was growth that started protruding from from what
(09:16):
I saw beneath his upper lip. So the way that
I read that, Chuck, is that like when you pull
your your top lip up, that part of your gums
right there above your teeth, that he had like a
growth start that started there and it got pretty big.
I think it got up to about eight inches long,
and that I guess you would just look at it
(09:37):
and be like wow, that looks a lot like an
elephant's trunk. This this strange growth that's growing up from
under this poor man's top lip um, and he later
had it removed so it doesn't show up in any
photographs of him. But that supposedly is um one of
the places where the idea that he was an elephant
man came from. Yeah. So as far as his family goes,
(09:57):
he had a couple of younger siblings. It seems like
both of them passed away. William Arthur Um succumbed to
smallpox and Marian Eliza. It just says on her death
certificate that she was crippled from birth with an unknown ailment.
And he Um he went to school like he Like
(10:18):
I said, it didn't start happening un till he was five,
and it wasn't so severe right away that he couldn't
go to school like any other kid would his age. Um,
things really took a turn though, when his mom died
when he was eleven years old. Things went really bad
for him. Yeah, so there's like a few things that
you should know about his mom. So his his mom
(10:40):
was vilified by his biographer, who also would turn out
to be a surgeon. Um who will talk about later.
Frederick Treeve's um as as a terrible woman who abandoned him,
and um, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
And in fact, Um Joseph recalled his mom is a
very saintly sweet woman who was basically his only friend.
(11:03):
Because when you're you know, starting around five and uh
you and you, you are having trouble keeping up with
other kids. Something else happened in when he was five
two Chuck, he injured, He felt really hard and injured
his hip, and that injury became infected, so he became
um what at the time they would have called lame
or crippled in his I believe his left leg. So
(11:25):
he had trouble walking from the age of five. In
addition to his genetic condition, um that was making him
look more and more different. So he became further and
further alienated from his friends. I saw a quote that
said that he was becoming a lonely, introspective child, increasingly
dependent on his mother for company. And luckily, his mother
(11:46):
seems to have been a very sweet woman who, again
in the vertacular, was crippled. That's how she was described.
So we have no idea in what way, But today
you would describe her as without the use of say
one or more of her limbs. So they had like
that kind of connection. But she also was very protective
of Joseph two. So when she died it was more
(12:08):
than him just losing his mother at age eleven. It
was him losing like his best friend, his his main companion,
um and the source of like basically anything good in
his life was was taken from him at a very
young age. Yeah, his father remarried and by all accounts
his father and stepmother were not very kind to him
at all. They were emotionally abusive, uh could be physically abusive. Um.
(12:33):
He left school at age thirteen, which is um about
when kids left school back then, and got a job
at a cigar factory and Um worked there for a
couple of years until his left arm got to the
point in hand such that he couldn't do the job anymore.
So at that point he got what they called a
hawker's license in order to help his dad, who had
(12:56):
a couple of small businesses. But he helped his dad
sell stuff from his hab a dashery in England there
and then eventually went to work at the Lester Union workhouse. Uh.
He ran away from home a couple of times. It
was just a really bad scene and eventually landed with
his uncle, who was a barber named Charles, and he
(13:19):
was a good guy and he um, he felt bad
for what Joseph was going through and sort of his
home life, so he took him in and that ended
up being um, after a couple of really bad years
with his dad and stepmother, a really nice place to
be for a little while. Yeah, stepmother was just pretty evil.
She she um. She was the one that made him
drop out of school at thirteen and go get a job.
(13:40):
And when he was hawking stuff from his father's shop,
if he didn't come home with uh, you know, enough money, um,
she wouldn't give him a full meal. I guess she'd
give him enough food to sustain him, but she if
he couldn't pay for the meal that she had on
offer with the proceeds from what he sold that day,
she wouldn't give him that meal. And then his father
(14:00):
would frequently beat him too, So it's no wonder that
he he tried to run away, but then his father
would go get him and bring him back home. So
he had a terrible life. And yeah, luckily he had
the uncle named Charles who who took him in for
a little while. But even he was like, I can't
support you anymore, kid, because after a little while, very sadly,
Joseph actually had his hawker's license revoked because he was
(14:23):
deemed a menace to the community because he was scaring
people when he was going door to door trying to
sell stuff. His appearance scared people and there were enough
complaints that the city revoked his license. So at the
at the end, by the time he was seventeen, he
had no choice but to go to the Union Workhouse,
which is a poorhouse. It's what Dickens described in Oliver
(14:45):
Twist and some of his other stories, where you went
there if you were either unable or unwilling to support
yourself through honest work, and they would put you to
work and it was basically like a prison for poor people. Um,
they'd fee you and they give you a bed, but
it was a very cruel place to live. And that's
where he spent a little while, I think five years um,
(15:07):
because he had no other choice, and then finally chuck
out at one point towards the end of his stay
at the union workhouse. He said, you know what, there's
an alternative for me, and I'm going to take it.
And we should probably take a break now and uh,
maybe come back and talk a little bit about his
this mystery illness that he had that we now sort
(15:28):
of understand. Yea, So he referred to himself as the
(16:01):
elephant boy and then the elephant man. Um. This was
a moniker that was uh, he he sort of embraced.
But he thought his whole life that he was this
way because of something called maternal impression, which was still
a common belief back then, which was that something could
(16:21):
happen to a mother while pregnant that would affect the baby.
And that's not to say, you know, she drank or
smoked and had a literal, um literal effect on the
development of the of the baby. Um. What they meant
was she was knocked over by an elephant when she
was pregnant, and that is what caused his illness. And
(16:44):
he believed that his whole life and the whole notion
of maternal impression obviously something in the late eighteen hundreds
mid eighteen hundreds was um, it's kind of crazy to
think about now, but they actually thought that in utero
it could have an effect like that. Yeah, yeah, so,
I mean, but it also kind of makes sense. Don't
you think that if he started to basically grow, what
(17:06):
you'd be like that looks like an elephant's trunk. Your
mom was knocked over and almost stomped by an elephant
once when she was pregnant with you. We have no
idea what genetics are yet. I mean, you could see somebody,
you know, making sense of it that way. Maybe. I
guess it's hard to kind of put my head in
that mindset back then. But um, what we now think,
(17:26):
and what doctors now think, is that he had either
UH a case of neurofibro mitosis or UH and or
something called proteo syndrome. And it really seems like proteo syndrome,
as rare as it is, is probably what he suffered from. Yeah,
I saw that. Experts in neurofibromatosis have categorically ruled that
(17:49):
out is what he had, because with neurofibromatosis you have
all sorts of tumors that actually grow on your nerve tissue,
so your nerve endings, your spine, brain, and he may
have had those, so it's possible he did have a
case of that, but like you said, it's much likelier
as proteus syndrome, which is characterized by basically an overgrowth
(18:11):
of tissue of bone of organs even um and and
I looked into this. So it has a genetic basis,
as I kind of mentioned a couple of times, Chuck,
But it's based on this idea of mosaicism, which is
where you end up after you're conceived in your cells
start dividing um. At some point, there's a mutation that
(18:34):
occurs and your cells start dividing differently in in that
they have two different sets of chromosomes. So you have
two different sets of cells with different sets of chromosomes,
and they start doing their own thing and in building
a human body, but it becomes incoherent. Whereas it would
if they were uniform and all the cells shared the
(18:56):
same set of of DNA or the same gene set um,
they would build a coherent human But in this case
it's incoherent. And it's kind of like if you gave
two different building plans to two different construction companies and
told them to build on the same site at the
same time and just ignore each other. That's what you
(19:16):
would produce. But in this case, it's not a building,
it's a human body. Yeah, I've heard of mosaic downs
is the only time I've heard that used, and I
think it's sort of similar in that case. But as
far as proteosyndrome goes UM, it's progressive UM. Your body
could be covered with um tumors, either benign or malignant. UM.
(19:38):
It can malform blood vessels, you can have skin lesions,
you can have blood clotting which results in all kinds
of problems like deep vein thrombosis or maybe pulmonary embolism.
It can affect basically any kind of tissue from fat
to skin to your central nervous system. It's really depends
(20:01):
on the patient UM and who's afflicted how it can
affect you. And uh, it usually I mean his was
onset pretty late. If it started, I guess outwardly at
least at five years old, because it typically starts anywhere
from six months to eighteen months of age. Right. Um.
But that's another thing about neurofibromatosis is that it um.
(20:22):
It usually starts at like the get it's onset is
at birth or before birth, so that's another reason another
strike against it. So UM, so it's pretty clear they
think that that he he had proteus syndrome. And it's
actually a pretty recent thing, like I think it was
first described in ninety nine and they said there's probably
(20:45):
about two hundred people who have ever appeared in the
medical literature that had it. And then some other reviewers
in two thousand eleven did another survey of of the
medical literature and paired it down to basically one people
in the history of medicine whoever had proteus syndrome. And
the thing is is Joseph Merrick may have had the
(21:06):
most pronounced advanced case of proteus syndrome ever of anybody. Um.
He he had basically every every symptom you can possibly have.
But the big problems that he suffered from where like
you said, his his right hand was was UM, he
couldn't use it because it had kind of fused into
(21:29):
a fin like appendage. UM. He had joints that he
couldn't move because the bones had had overgrown. He couldn't
hear out of his right ear because his skull had overgrown.
And actually, if you see pictures of his skull today. Um,
he's it's just huge and massive, and apparently it weighed
something like twenty pounds and got to something like three
(21:50):
ft in circumference, which is about a foot and circumference
more than the average human man's head. Um. So it
was just enormous. And all it was was he had
cells that were that didn't know when to stop growing,
whether it was bone or tissue or skin or whatever.
He also had problems inside of his mouth with bony
growths too, which affected his speech. Yeah. He um, he
(22:14):
couldn't sleep laying down. Uh, he had to sleep. I
think one of his associates later in life he he
liked to draw a curtain around himself when he slept.
But one of his associates, um, kind of peeked in
one night and saw that he slept sitting up with
his knees drawn into his chest, with his head resting
forward on his knees. So if you can imagine like
sleeping like that every night of your life. Because his
(22:36):
head was so strong and so big that he would
risk waking up with a broken neck and it affected
his breathing. Um. I just I wonder if the late
seventies when they first described proteo syndrome with that coincided
with the interest in Merrick's story. Maybe we solved it.
That's weird. Yeah, that would be weird. But I haven't
(22:56):
seen anybody mentioned that. It's almost like he just you're
in the zeitgeists somehow around then. I don't I don't
get it. But yeah, maybe that was it. But um,
but no, it couldn't be Chuck because it wasn't until
night six that some geneticists said that he probably had
proteus syndrome for the first time, so it would have
been after that. Yeah, it's just strange. So one one
(23:20):
thing I want to say though about about proteo syndrome
and mosaicism, um mosaicism, that mutation happens after conception. So
the weird cosmic irony of this whole thing is it's
entirely possible that that mutation did happen around the time
that his mother was pushed down in front of that elephant.
(23:41):
It would have had nothing to do with the elephant,
like she she wouldn't have been frightened into this mutation
or anything. But how ironic would it be if it
happened at virtually the same time you know. So, uh.
In the late eighteen hundreds four is when Merrick decided
it was a pretty brave choice basically to take his
(24:02):
life in his own hands and say, listen, I'm not
gonna um, I can't go door to door, I can't
stay in this work poorhouse any longer. I want to
be able to sustain myself and not just end up
in some you know, dark room of a hospital living
off the government. Like I want to live my life
as best as I can. So he checked himself out
(24:24):
of that workhouse and he decided to reach out to
a man named Sam Tor who ran the Lester Music
Hall h called the Gaiety Place of Varieties, and he
started exhibiting himself as the Elephant Man, half man, half elephant,
and he achieved a lot of success early on um there,
and then he eventually moved to London, made even more
(24:46):
money and was actually, I mean, we don't have real
numbers on his income, but it was reportedly fairly substantial,
like enough to enough to live and live well. Yeah. Um,
although living well, I mean it's a relative term. Because
when he made the move to London, he was on
display in a storefront in a building that's still there today.
(25:08):
It's now numbered two fifty nine White Chapel Road in
Shadwell in London. Um, and you can go visit the
store today they sell Sorry's there. From what I understand, Um,
But he was he lived in an iron bed and
in the back of the the store and then would
come out for these performances this exhibit. But the thing
(25:29):
is is like he was part of a side show.
But he was a partner in the side show act.
He he partnered with a man named Tom the Silver
King Morgan, who was already a showman and Um, I
guess bought out Uh Sam tores shares in Merrick's exhibition
and took over for him and um when he was
(25:51):
displaying him like like I said, they were, they were partners. Like.
There was a pamphlet that you would get that I
think there's still copies of in existence today with kind
of a crude drawing of of Joseph Merrick on the
front and like you said, it said the elephant man,
half man, half elephant. Um. And part of the biography
in the pamphlet was written by Joseph Merrick. It had
(26:12):
the whole story about his mother being pushed down in
front of an elephant and everything. So like a lot
of people just you know, talk about how he was
exploited or whatever. He was doing this for work, um,
And I guess part of the rationale that he used
was people stared at him anyway. Like by this time,
when he went out in public, he would wear like
a cloak. He had a cap with a hood that
(26:34):
hung down from it, and he put this on so that,
you know, he just looked like this mysterious shape moving
through the town. But at the very least he wasn't
just like um as gaulked at as he would be without,
you know, wearing a hat and a hood and all that. Um.
But his his rationale was that people are going to
stare anyway, I might as well charge him for it.
(26:56):
And that's exactly what he did um at that storefront
and in London. And it just so happened, Chuck, that
that storefront was located directly across the street and still
is from the London Hospital and some doctors they're caught
wind of this curiosity who was on exhibit just right
across the street, and they they some of them showed
up to to check it out. He had at one
(27:17):
point he met up with a surgeon who had heard
about his story named Frederick Treeves, and he invited him
to come in for an examination. And this is um,
you know at this point in Merrik had I guess
it was sort of his peak of his deformities in
his troubles. At this point, his head was about thirty
(27:39):
six inches in circumference, that right wrist was about twelve
inches around, and he had those tumors all over his body.
Like we said, a lot of trouble walking and talking.
But when he was examined by by the doctor, he
was like, you know, other than this, you're in pretty
good health. Um. He ended up having a heart problem
later on, but um, he said, other than that, you're
(28:02):
in decent health. And he said, I would like to
present you, if I could, to the Pathological Society of
London and to come in for more exams. And it's
at this point where Merrek um, I think, sort of
cut the notion in his head that listen, I am
getting the same feeling um of being on display in
(28:22):
the storefront, and I don't like how it feels. I
think one of his quotes was the experience made him
feel like an animal in a cattle market, and he said,
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go from showing myself
in the storefront to being paraded around in front of
a bunch of doctors for some sort of yeah, some
(28:42):
sort of weird medical experiment. Yeah. So so Treats like
very clearly identified, Um, Joseph Merrick is a really great
case study that Treats could make his his name on,
and ultimately he did. Um. But when he asked Joseph
to come back for more tests and more displays and
demonstrations in in, Joseph declined. Apparently Tribes was very upset
(29:07):
by this, and then a lot of people say not coincidentally,
but it's never been proven that he had any hand
in it whatsoever. Shortly after he was rebuffed or he
rebuffed Trees invitation again. Um, the elephant Man exhibit was
shut down by police. London outlawed that particular exhibit. On
the one hand, it makes sense because Victorian society it
(29:30):
kind of started to come to see side shows or
freak shows as they were called at the time, as
really exploitive and distasteful, even ones where the person on
display was a willing participant, and then other people think
well it was revenged by treats. He he was kind
of that kind of person potentially to do something petty
like that. But however it happened his show got shut down,
(29:52):
and he found himself pretty well off, like you said,
like he had a lot of money, he just wasn't
living very well. He was living in an iron bed
in a cold storefront. And he said, you know, I've
always wanted to go see Europe the continent, and uh,
I'm I'm going to go try my hand in Belgium
and see what they think of my exhibit. And so
we moved to Belgium for a while and started up
in exhibit there. Yeah, so in Belgium is where um
(30:17):
he had some sort of ups and downs. He was
ended up being robbed by a manager there who took
him on and he took basically all the money that
he had saved, and it was it was a good
amount of money, um, you know, And that's I think
that's kind of how we know that he had some
uh some decent success and made a decent living back
in the UK. And in eighty six he goes back
(30:41):
to England and once he's there, he goes back to
the London Hospital. They say that this is an incurable
thing that you have and uh. There was a letter
published in The Times from the chairman of the hospital,
Francis carr Goam, that said, UM that talked about his
case basic lee and said, hey, if there's if there's
(31:01):
anyone out there that thinks they could help this man, Um,
please get in touch with us. There was a big
outpouring of support, mainly financial UM, which really helped Merik
out because, like I said, he had his life savings
taken and was definitely a hard luck case at this
point financially and he was able to use that money
UM basically to live on for the rest of his life. Yeah. Yeah,
(31:25):
I mean, like there's a story that that Um Treeves
said in his memoirs. Like I said before, there's only
two surviving pieces of contemporary writing about Joseph Merrick. One
is the Memoirs of Frederick Trieves his his doctor the
man who ended up becoming his doctor, and then the
other was the pamphlet written um in part by Joseph
(31:46):
Merrick about his life that was handed out at the
side show. But in tribes Memoirs, he recounts a story
that Um, Joseph was so bad off when he finally
found passage back after being abandoned, beaten, robbed, in belled him.
When he found passage back to UK, he couldn't even
speak um with either because he was just so so
(32:07):
shattered by the experience or because um his the bony
protrusions in his mouth had progressed so much. But regardless
of the police supposedly found a business card of Frederick
Trieve's on him and they took Joseph to Frederick Treeves
so he was kind of at least according to trus
memoirs delivered by Providence, back into Tree's hands. And then yeah,
(32:30):
at the hospital they were kind of like, look, you know,
this is a really sad story, but he's an incurable
there's nothing that we can do about. He's got to go.
And if it hadn't have been for Francis car Gone
basically turning out and saying like, hey, we don't know
what a go fund me is yet, but this is
basically what we're going to do. And the response that
he got was just so massive that that yeah, they
(32:52):
basically said, Okay, there's enough money here now that you
can live here for the rest of your life if
you want to. And one of the big things that
really kicked it off, uck was a visit from Alexandra
or Alexander. Yeah, Alexandra, um Princess of Wales, and the
Princess of Wales title is what Princess Die or Kate
Middleton have now has has now Like it's a big
(33:13):
deal title in the royal family. So this is basically
like Princess Die or Princess Kate showing up to visit
him and shake his hand. And so it became very
fashionable among um London's high society to visit Joseph Merrikan
patronize him basically and make sure that he was supported.
And it really gave the last four years of his
life like this amazing boost. Like he went from real
(33:37):
hardship and exploitation to about as cushy a life as
somebody with his medical condition can have and being celebrated
as a as a really interesting good person um by London,
you know, the last few years of his life, which
is a real silver lining to this story. You know, yeah,
we should take our last break here and talk about
(33:58):
those last few years a little bit more after this
m so uh April eleven is when Joseph Merrick finally
(34:36):
passed on, he was twenty seven years old. They found
him lying flat on his back in his bed. So, um,
this article gets it super wrong. Um. From how Stuff Works?
They say that that, um this They quote a historian
from University of You Talk called uh Naja what is
her name? Der Back and she says that it's highly
(34:58):
likely that Merrick committed suicide. And that is almost almost
almost surely incorrect. Um. He the story. The legend goes
that he um, he had he wanted to always sleep
like other people, flat on his back, but he couldn't
because his head was too heavy and it would crush
his windpipe. And that when he was discovered dead in
(35:22):
his bed, he was flat on his back. Um, and
had clearly tried to sleep like that because he wanted
to be like normal people. And I think even in
the David Lynch movie, that's how he dies, isn't it.
I've never seen it. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute,
wait a minute. Really correct? Oh you're gonna love it, dude.
(35:44):
It's one of the better movies ever made. I think
it will be one of your favorites. I'll be very
surprised if you don't absolutely love it. Um, wow, this
I guess this research just spoiled it for you. Huh.
I knew the story, but yeah, I've never seen it
all the way through. Yeah, it's it's a good movie,
but in it, I think that's how they depict his
his demise as well. But if you go back and
you look at the um the postmortem report or the
(36:07):
reports from the port postmortem report, he was actually found
in the middle of the day. He'd already been awakened,
he had been brought lunch at like one thirty pm,
and he was totally fine. But then when another doctor
dropped by on his rounds to see how he was
doing at three pm, he was found dead. And he
was laying across his bed, and they think the way
(36:27):
that he was laying indicated he tried to get up
and either maybe he pulled a muscle or he had
a heart attack or something like that happened and he slipped,
and that's a big deal for him because his head
weeighth twenty pounds and apparently when he went down, his
head twisted just right and and twisted his vertebrae and
(36:48):
killed him like that. So the initial um autopsy said
that he died of dis disconnected or dislocated vertebrae. And
apparently somebody studied his bones in the last of your
years and said, actually, that's that's probably exactly how he died,
based on what his his skeleton looks like still today. Wow.
So after he died, Uh, they they basically took his
(37:14):
flesh from his body. Uh, they boiled down his bones
because they wanted to have those for display and for study,
and they are still on display. And um, they ended
up burying his very unceremoniously buried, um what was left
of him, his organs and his remaining flesh and an
unmarked grave. And there's a lot of speculation whether you
(37:36):
know what kind of relationship he had with Trieves, and
whether or not he really cared for him like he
claimed to, or whether he was just sort of a
doctor exploiting this really um sort of exceptional case. Um.
The reason he's known as John Merrick is because, um,
because Treeves called him that in a book, even though
that wasn't his name. So, UM, there's been a lot
(37:57):
of speculation about the true nature there. Yeah, there's a
there's another author um quoted in this house stuff works
article named Joanne Vigor Mungo Vin. She's a she's a
written at least one book on on Joseph Merrick. And
she um actually found his grave has lost unmarked grave
(38:18):
and confirmed that he had been buried in consecrated ground
in a common grave, which apparently was common in those
two in those days, like people have been buried in
that grave before him, and people were buried in that
grave after him. Um. But it was in consecrated ground
in an actual cemetery, wasn't like tossed in a ditch
like right outside the medical school or anything like that. Um.
And so she made sure that he got a marker
(38:39):
UM put up on that grave in the last I
think the last couple of years she found it, and
maybe two thou two nineteen, I think even as recent
as that. Wow, that's pretty uh, pretty amazing. And then
one other thing, Chuck, did you do you remember when
Michael Jackson um famously made a bid for the Elephant
Man's bones. I do, except that that did not happen.
(39:03):
That was all just a big cooked up rumor from
a man named Frank Dilio who said that Michael bid
five thousand dollars and then a million dollars on the
bones of the elephant man, who was someone he apparently
felt very akin to and apparently that is not true,
(39:24):
and it was just sort of like the hyperbaric chamber
that that never happened. Uh, and Jackson ended up making
light of it a little bit and uh and they
Leave Me Alone short film by dancing with an animated
version his skeleton. Yeah, so that and that's really weird.
But the thing is, if you go back and search
that there are like associated press articles from about it,
(39:48):
and they they include quotes from people who work at
the London Hospital Medical College who said that they had
had turned down his offers. So it's it's really weird
because I mean I always had heard it was made
up as well. Yeah, I mean I think, um, it's
one of those things where they, i mean, his mom
said it could have even come from ah from him
(40:10):
as far as not actually bidding on them, but just
to make up the story to get in the newspapers. Yeah. So,
I mean one of the things that just wanted to
make sure to drive home is that Joseph Merrik didn't
give up. I think that's why I was so bugged
by the idea that this this historian just so Cavalier
was like it was highly likely he committed suicide, even
though all the evidence points to the idea that he didn't.
(40:32):
But Joseph Merrick lived twenty seven years putting up with
some of the most humiliating, disparaging, terrible treatment that any
humans ever had to endure, and he did it with
like grace and dignity. He like read, and he wrote poetry,
and he like corresponded with people, and he had like
a gentle soft heart. And you know, finally, thanks to
(40:54):
things like you know, the stage play and David Lynch's movie,
he's he's been portrayed accurately in that sense. And I
think that that's great because I think that that's that
will be his legacy forever as somebody who was a
very admirable human being who put up with a lot
more than you know, I probably could have with with
dignity and grace. It's quite a story. Uh well, since
(41:15):
Chuck said is quite a story, that means that that's
it for the Elephant Man, and that it's time for
a listener mail. I'm gonna call this the ghost story.
Recently for the Halloween, we rereleased our ghost episode and
where I detailed the old lady I saw on Athens
in the middle of the road. And this comes from
Eric King. He said, I I thought i'd share this
(41:38):
with you guys. Uh. In the episode of Unsolved Mysteries
that reminds me of this, there was a motorcyclist named
Robert Davidson who was struck by lightning after pulling to
the side of the road during a storm. When paramedics arrived,
the situation looked grim as a crowd began to gather
around the incident, A mysterious woman in a black dress
holding a bible appeared just like my lady. She bypassed
(42:00):
paramedics and began to pray over Davidson. After a few
tense moments of her chanting and beating her bible in
the ground, he began to show signs of life again.
The woman in the black dress smiled and then disappeared
amongst the crowd. Davidson wound up in a coma for
two months, but came out of it with no uh
no permanent injuries. Upon further investigation, it was found that
(42:22):
the road where he was struck was near a site
that was once a religious community in the mid eighteen hundreds.
The black dress witnesses claimed, Uh, the woman was wearing
a similar outfit to the one on display in a
museum containing artifacts from the site. So Eric says, I
think he thinks I should investigate mine a little bit more.
(42:42):
Maybe there was a similar religious site near there where
I saw the woman in black. And then it's from
Eric King and uh, he and his wife were big,
big listeners. Well thanks a lot, Eric, that was a
great one, appreciated big time. Um, Chuck, you're gonna do
some research. I was actually doing so anyway the other day.
So I'm gonna I'm gonna keep it up. Oh cool man,
what do you have you found anything so far? Nothing? Okay? Well, yeah,
(43:05):
you've got to report back if you find even the
slightest shred of evidence of anything. Okay, of course. Uh. Well,
while we wait for Chuck's report on the source and
origin of his ghosts. Um, we'll leave you to it,
and you can write into us to say hi, and
how's it going with your research? Chuck? Write it in
an email and send it off to Stuff Podcast at
(43:27):
iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeart Radio for more podcasts for my heart Radio,
Is it the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry's
out there floating in the ether like the omniscient green goddess,
salad dressing that she is. This is stuff you should know.
(00:26):
Why do you work on that, buddy? That is off
the cuff? Don't you know me? By now? Off the dome?
As they say, I don't see that. I say off
the cuff. It's not cool enough to say off the dome.
But you're shirtless, so there is no cuff. That's that
is true? Man, I hadn't thought about all this. Maybe
I should changed off the dome. Speaking of domes, Chuck, Yeah,
(00:47):
what were you gonna say? I was going to talk
about Thunderdome? Were you really? I'm always this close to
talking about Thunderdome? Yeah. I guess that's that's a pretty
way to be, isn't it. Sure? So who's who? Chuck?
Am I master or blaster? And are you master or blaster?
Are we both blaster and both master? I'm not sure
(01:08):
who was who? But I would prefer to ride around
on your shoulders. That's fine. I prefer to be a
giant shirtless man wearing nothing but a leather daddy across
belt across my chest, which I guess I could probably
do that anyway. You know, why not, I'm Tina Turner.
Oh so you're Tina Turner writing on blasters shoulders? Yes,
(01:31):
what happened to master? Uh? That was? That was? We
don't like to talk about it. Two men entered, that's
all I'll say. Okay, he was suffocated by Tina Turner
sitting on him. That's right. So UM, obviously, Chuck, we're
talking about one of the most in my opinion, admirable,
brave human beings to ever walk the face of the earth. UM,
(01:55):
and a man named Joseph Merrick, who a lot of
people UM no of his John Merrick incorrectly, but probably know.
I'm even better as the elephant man. That's right. And uh,
you know we have to use those words because that's
how he was referred to. Um. We'll get into the
reasons why, but we're gonna call him Joseph Merrick mainly
(02:19):
because that's the man's name, and we don't like to
to call somebody by their sideshow name. It's a rule here, sure, no,
but it should be noted that um, he was uh
And it's really I think a lot of people probably
don't realize this, but he um was an active, willing
and initiating participant, founding member, you could say, of his
(02:40):
own sideshow act. Um. So he was fully on board
with the idea of being called the elephant man um,
which is just another facet of this extremely complex person,
you know who. I think it's painted with a very
simple brush sometimes. But the great thing is is a
lot of times when you when you look into a
widely misunderstood, wildly oversimplified person, you very frequently find that
(03:08):
there's a lot of like really terrible stuff to them,
Like they you know, like, um, they were fine with
with hitting women. They thought that that was like a
totally fine thing to do, like Sean Connery, right, and instead, Um,
when you look into Joseph Merrick, you find, oh my gosh,
like he was even he was an even better person
than I I dared hope, you know, like he was
(03:29):
a really great guy who went through just hell on
Earth in the twenty seven years that he was alive. Yeah. So, um,
you may have heard of the story of the Elephant
Man from UM a few things in pop culture, namely
the David Lynch movie UM or perhaps the various Broadway
(03:50):
shows UM. I watched a few of those, like clips
from a few of those. He's been played by David Bowie,
Billy Crudup, recently by Bradley Cooper, and I was kind
of Bradley Cooper said that the movie caused him to
want to become an actor, so it's actually pretty apropos
that he played him. Eventually, Well, we can all thank
(04:11):
Joseph Merrick for Bradley Cooper's success, That's right. But yeah,
I was kind of curious because I was like, did
they undergo prosthetics? Like how do they pull this off?
But UM, I'm sure you looked at some of the clips.
No one does that. When you play Joseph Merrick. You
just embodied the man. You um, sort of contort your
(04:32):
body in certain ways and you just sort of play
the person. And I think that's a good way to
go about it, rather than just you know, throwing some
uh some big mask over David Bowie or something like that. Right. Yeah, Yeah,
they just kind of contorted their body, they altered their
speech and just affected they like they Yeah, I think
(04:56):
it was a good way to go to And apparently
I don't remember the guy's name, but the guy the
first guy to play Joseph Merrick in the stage version
and when that came out and I think seventy nine
or eighty, Um, he he was the one who started
that trend and really kind of came up with this
this embodiment that everybody else has has kind of followed
suit with afterwards. And I don't know, I didn't catch it.
(05:17):
Did you say Mark Hamill was one of the people
who played him, Yeah, Luke Skywalker he uh yeah, he
used the force, he did. So there's something really weird
that happened in the late seventies, and I am not
quite sure what it was. But in nineteen seventy nine,
the stage play based on Joseph Merritt came out. In
(05:38):
nineteen eighty, David Lynch released the Just the legendary film,
one of the best films ever made about um Joseph Merrick.
And then there was a definitive book that was written
as well by a pair of authors. Um, one of
whom I believe was like a doctor who had like
all this great research, but his writing was a little
(05:59):
over the top, so they assigned a ghostwriter with him,
and they basically wrote the definitive book on Joseph Merrick's life,
UM and medical condition. And all three of these projects
happened independently, like one wasn't adapted from the other or
anything like that, and they all came out at around
the same time, which is really strange in and of itself.
(06:19):
But it's even stranger to think that all of this
happened um centered on a character who had been largely
forgotten by this time, you know, like there was really
only two surviving um pieces of literature about him, about
Joseph Merrick, the man um that that that anyone was
(06:39):
aware of, and they had been written in the nineteenth century.
But then suddenly, for some reason in the late seventies,
three different projects started up about Joseph American kind of
made him a icon for humanity that is still, you know,
lasting today. Yeah. I think the seventies spawned Disco Fever
and Elephant man Fever. Sorry, and they were both rather
(07:02):
unlikely considering uh, both Disco and Joseph Merrick were born
in the eighteen hundreds, specifically in England on August five,
eighteen sixty two. So I meant to look it up.
I don't know if it's Is it Leicestershire like the
sauce Leicester Lester Lester? Right, yeah, you have that last time.
It's just Lester from what I understand. Okay, So he
(07:25):
was born in Leicester, England, on August five, eighteen sixty two.
And UM, we'll talk a little bit about what they
are pretty sure his condition was. But being eighteen sixty
two at the time, Um, after he started developing, um,
some very strange symptoms at the age of five, doctors
back then we're pretty flummixed. Yeah, yes, yeah, So. UM.
(07:50):
The reason why is, we'll see, is because they think
he's one of maybe a hundred people in the entire
history of the world, or at least as far as
people have been writing stuff like this down on um,
to have this condition that he had. So it's not
like he started developing strangely and they were like, oh, well,
you know, this is what's going on, this is what's
(08:11):
to be expected. Instead, just a little by little his
body started taking on these odd differing forms. Um. And
like you said, I think it was around the age
of five that he really started to to show that
he was going to be rather different. Yeah, it was five.
His father Joseph and his mother Mary Jane noticed he
(08:32):
had swollen lips, and then a lump started to form
on his forehead. His skin started to kind of get
loose and rough. Um, And this was just sort of
the beginning. His face became spongy, his jaw started to deform,
his speech was impaired. Um. The right side of his
body was, or at least upper body was a little
(08:54):
more or I guess a lot more affected, because it
seemed like his left arm in hand stayed kind of
as is, but the right side arm became sort of
like this giant fin right. So. Um. The the thing
that I guess kind of gave him the moniker the
elephant man was growth that started protruding from from what
(09:16):
I saw beneath his upper lip. So the way that
I read that, Chuck, is that like when you pull
your your top lip up, that part of your gums
right there above your teeth, that he had like a
growth start that started there and it got pretty big.
I think it got up to about eight inches long,
and that I guess you would just look at it
(09:37):
and be like wow, that looks a lot like an
elephant's trunk. This this strange growth that's growing up from
under this poor man's top lip um, and he later
had it removed so it doesn't show up in any
photographs of him. But that supposedly is um one of
the places where the idea that he was an elephant
man came from. Yeah. So as far as his family goes,
(09:57):
he had a couple of younger siblings. It seems like
both of them passed away. William Arthur Um succumbed to
smallpox and Marian Eliza. It just says on her death
certificate that she was crippled from birth with an unknown ailment.
And he Um he went to school like he Like
(10:18):
I said, it didn't start happening un till he was five,
and it wasn't so severe right away that he couldn't
go to school like any other kid would his age. Um,
things really took a turn though, when his mom died
when he was eleven years old. Things went really bad
for him. Yeah, so there's like a few things that
you should know about his mom. So his his mom
(10:40):
was vilified by his biographer, who also would turn out
to be a surgeon. Um who will talk about later.
Frederick Treeve's um as as a terrible woman who abandoned him,
and um, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
And in fact, Um Joseph recalled his mom is a
very saintly sweet woman who was basically his only friend.
(11:03):
Because when you're you know, starting around five and uh
you and you, you are having trouble keeping up with
other kids. Something else happened in when he was five
two Chuck, he injured, He felt really hard and injured
his hip, and that injury became infected, so he became
um what at the time they would have called lame
or crippled in his I believe his left leg. So
(11:25):
he had trouble walking from the age of five. In
addition to his genetic condition, um that was making him
look more and more different. So he became further and
further alienated from his friends. I saw a quote that
said that he was becoming a lonely, introspective child, increasingly
dependent on his mother for company. And luckily, his mother
(11:46):
seems to have been a very sweet woman who, again
in the vertacular, was crippled. That's how she was described.
So we have no idea in what way, But today
you would describe her as without the use of say
one or more of her limbs. So they had like
that kind of connection. But she also was very protective
of Joseph two. So when she died it was more
(12:08):
than him just losing his mother at age eleven. It
was him losing like his best friend, his his main companion,
um and the source of like basically anything good in
his life was was taken from him at a very
young age. Yeah, his father remarried and by all accounts
his father and stepmother were not very kind to him
at all. They were emotionally abusive, uh could be physically abusive. Um.
(12:33):
He left school at age thirteen, which is um about
when kids left school back then, and got a job
at a cigar factory and Um worked there for a
couple of years until his left arm got to the
point in hand such that he couldn't do the job anymore.
So at that point he got what they called a
hawker's license in order to help his dad, who had
(12:56):
a couple of small businesses. But he helped his dad
sell stuff from his hab a dashery in England there
and then eventually went to work at the Lester Union workhouse. Uh.
He ran away from home a couple of times. It
was just a really bad scene and eventually landed with
his uncle, who was a barber named Charles, and he
(13:19):
was a good guy and he um, he felt bad
for what Joseph was going through and sort of his
home life, so he took him in and that ended
up being um, after a couple of really bad years
with his dad and stepmother, a really nice place to
be for a little while. Yeah, stepmother was just pretty evil.
She she um. She was the one that made him
drop out of school at thirteen and go get a job.
(13:40):
And when he was hawking stuff from his father's shop,
if he didn't come home with uh, you know, enough money, um,
she wouldn't give him a full meal. I guess she'd
give him enough food to sustain him, but she if
he couldn't pay for the meal that she had on
offer with the proceeds from what he sold that day,
she wouldn't give him that meal. And then his father
(14:00):
would frequently beat him too, So it's no wonder that
he he tried to run away, but then his father
would go get him and bring him back home. So
he had a terrible life. And yeah, luckily he had
the uncle named Charles who who took him in for
a little while. But even he was like, I can't
support you anymore, kid, because after a little while, very sadly,
Joseph actually had his hawker's license revoked because he was
(14:23):
deemed a menace to the community because he was scaring
people when he was going door to door trying to
sell stuff. His appearance scared people and there were enough
complaints that the city revoked his license. So at the
at the end, by the time he was seventeen, he
had no choice but to go to the Union Workhouse,
which is a poorhouse. It's what Dickens described in Oliver
(14:45):
Twist and some of his other stories, where you went
there if you were either unable or unwilling to support
yourself through honest work, and they would put you to
work and it was basically like a prison for poor people. Um,
they'd fee you and they give you a bed, but
it was a very cruel place to live. And that's
where he spent a little while, I think five years um,
(15:07):
because he had no other choice, and then finally chuck
out at one point towards the end of his stay
at the union workhouse. He said, you know what, there's
an alternative for me, and I'm going to take it.
And we should probably take a break now and uh,
maybe come back and talk a little bit about his
this mystery illness that he had that we now sort
(15:28):
of understand. Yea, So he referred to himself as the
(16:01):
elephant boy and then the elephant man. Um. This was
a moniker that was uh, he he sort of embraced.
But he thought his whole life that he was this
way because of something called maternal impression, which was still
a common belief back then, which was that something could
(16:21):
happen to a mother while pregnant that would affect the baby.
And that's not to say, you know, she drank or
smoked and had a literal, um literal effect on the
development of the of the baby. Um. What they meant
was she was knocked over by an elephant when she
was pregnant, and that is what caused his illness. And
(16:44):
he believed that his whole life and the whole notion
of maternal impression obviously something in the late eighteen hundreds
mid eighteen hundreds was um, it's kind of crazy to
think about now, but they actually thought that in utero
it could have an effect like that. Yeah, yeah, so,
I mean, but it also kind of makes sense. Don't
you think that if he started to basically grow, what
(17:06):
you'd be like that looks like an elephant's trunk. Your
mom was knocked over and almost stomped by an elephant
once when she was pregnant with you. We have no
idea what genetics are yet. I mean, you could see somebody,
you know, making sense of it that way. Maybe. I
guess it's hard to kind of put my head in
that mindset back then. But um, what we now think,
(17:26):
and what doctors now think, is that he had either
UH a case of neurofibro mitosis or UH and or
something called proteo syndrome. And it really seems like proteo syndrome,
as rare as it is, is probably what he suffered from. Yeah,
I saw that. Experts in neurofibromatosis have categorically ruled that
(17:49):
out is what he had, because with neurofibromatosis you have
all sorts of tumors that actually grow on your nerve tissue,
so your nerve endings, your spine, brain, and he may
have had those, so it's possible he did have a
case of that, but like you said, it's much likelier
as proteus syndrome, which is characterized by basically an overgrowth
(18:11):
of tissue of bone of organs even um and and
I looked into this. So it has a genetic basis,
as I kind of mentioned a couple of times, Chuck,
But it's based on this idea of mosaicism, which is
where you end up after you're conceived in your cells
start dividing um. At some point, there's a mutation that
(18:34):
occurs and your cells start dividing differently in in that
they have two different sets of chromosomes. So you have
two different sets of cells with different sets of chromosomes,
and they start doing their own thing and in building
a human body, but it becomes incoherent. Whereas it would
if they were uniform and all the cells shared the
(18:56):
same set of of DNA or the same gene set um,
they would build a coherent human But in this case
it's incoherent. And it's kind of like if you gave
two different building plans to two different construction companies and
told them to build on the same site at the
same time and just ignore each other. That's what you
(19:16):
would produce. But in this case, it's not a building,
it's a human body. Yeah, I've heard of mosaic downs
is the only time I've heard that used, and I
think it's sort of similar in that case. But as
far as proteosyndrome goes UM, it's progressive UM. Your body
could be covered with um tumors, either benign or malignant. UM.
(19:38):
It can malform blood vessels, you can have skin lesions,
you can have blood clotting which results in all kinds
of problems like deep vein thrombosis or maybe pulmonary embolism.
It can affect basically any kind of tissue from fat
to skin to your central nervous system. It's really depends
(20:01):
on the patient UM and who's afflicted how it can
affect you. And uh, it usually I mean his was
onset pretty late. If it started, I guess outwardly at
least at five years old, because it typically starts anywhere
from six months to eighteen months of age. Right. Um.
But that's another thing about neurofibromatosis is that it um.
(20:22):
It usually starts at like the get it's onset is
at birth or before birth, so that's another reason another
strike against it. So UM, so it's pretty clear they
think that that he he had proteus syndrome. And it's
actually a pretty recent thing, like I think it was
first described in ninety nine and they said there's probably
(20:45):
about two hundred people who have ever appeared in the
medical literature that had it. And then some other reviewers
in two thousand eleven did another survey of of the
medical literature and paired it down to basically one people
in the history of medicine whoever had proteus syndrome. And
the thing is is Joseph Merrick may have had the
(21:06):
most pronounced advanced case of proteus syndrome ever of anybody. Um.
He he had basically every every symptom you can possibly have.
But the big problems that he suffered from where like
you said, his his right hand was was UM, he
couldn't use it because it had kind of fused into
(21:29):
a fin like appendage. UM. He had joints that he
couldn't move because the bones had had overgrown. He couldn't
hear out of his right ear because his skull had overgrown.
And actually, if you see pictures of his skull today. Um,
he's it's just huge and massive, and apparently it weighed
something like twenty pounds and got to something like three
(21:50):
ft in circumference, which is about a foot and circumference
more than the average human man's head. Um. So it
was just enormous. And all it was was he had
cells that were that didn't know when to stop growing,
whether it was bone or tissue or skin or whatever.
He also had problems inside of his mouth with bony
growths too, which affected his speech. Yeah. He um, he
(22:14):
couldn't sleep laying down. Uh, he had to sleep. I
think one of his associates later in life he he
liked to draw a curtain around himself when he slept.
But one of his associates, um, kind of peeked in
one night and saw that he slept sitting up with
his knees drawn into his chest, with his head resting
forward on his knees. So if you can imagine like
sleeping like that every night of your life. Because his
(22:36):
head was so strong and so big that he would
risk waking up with a broken neck and it affected
his breathing. Um. I just I wonder if the late
seventies when they first described proteo syndrome with that coincided
with the interest in Merrick's story. Maybe we solved it.
That's weird. Yeah, that would be weird. But I haven't
(22:56):
seen anybody mentioned that. It's almost like he just you're
in the zeitgeists somehow around then. I don't I don't
get it. But yeah, maybe that was it. But um,
but no, it couldn't be Chuck because it wasn't until
night six that some geneticists said that he probably had
proteus syndrome for the first time, so it would have
been after that. Yeah, it's just strange. So one one
(23:20):
thing I want to say though about about proteo syndrome
and mosaicism, um mosaicism, that mutation happens after conception. So
the weird cosmic irony of this whole thing is it's
entirely possible that that mutation did happen around the time
that his mother was pushed down in front of that elephant.
(23:41):
It would have had nothing to do with the elephant,
like she she wouldn't have been frightened into this mutation
or anything. But how ironic would it be if it
happened at virtually the same time you know. So, uh.
In the late eighteen hundreds four is when Merrick decided
it was a pretty brave choice basically to take his
(24:02):
life in his own hands and say, listen, I'm not
gonna um, I can't go door to door, I can't
stay in this work poorhouse any longer. I want to
be able to sustain myself and not just end up
in some you know, dark room of a hospital living
off the government. Like I want to live my life
as best as I can. So he checked himself out
(24:24):
of that workhouse and he decided to reach out to
a man named Sam Tor who ran the Lester Music
Hall h called the Gaiety Place of Varieties, and he
started exhibiting himself as the Elephant Man, half man, half elephant,
and he achieved a lot of success early on um there,
and then he eventually moved to London, made even more
(24:46):
money and was actually, I mean, we don't have real
numbers on his income, but it was reportedly fairly substantial,
like enough to enough to live and live well. Yeah. Um,
although living well, I mean it's a relative term. Because
when he made the move to London, he was on
display in a storefront in a building that's still there today.
(25:08):
It's now numbered two fifty nine White Chapel Road in
Shadwell in London. Um, and you can go visit the
store today they sell Sorry's there. From what I understand, Um,
But he was he lived in an iron bed and
in the back of the the store and then would
come out for these performances this exhibit. But the thing
(25:29):
is is like he was part of a side show.
But he was a partner in the side show act.
He he partnered with a man named Tom the Silver
King Morgan, who was already a showman and Um, I
guess bought out Uh Sam tores shares in Merrick's exhibition
and took over for him and um when he was
(25:51):
displaying him like like I said, they were, they were partners. Like.
There was a pamphlet that you would get that I
think there's still copies of in existence today with kind
of a crude drawing of of Joseph Merrick on the
front and like you said, it said the elephant man,
half man, half elephant. Um. And part of the biography
in the pamphlet was written by Joseph Merrick. It had
(26:12):
the whole story about his mother being pushed down in
front of an elephant and everything. So like a lot
of people just you know, talk about how he was
exploited or whatever. He was doing this for work, um,
And I guess part of the rationale that he used
was people stared at him anyway. Like by this time,
when he went out in public, he would wear like
a cloak. He had a cap with a hood that
(26:34):
hung down from it, and he put this on so that,
you know, he just looked like this mysterious shape moving
through the town. But at the very least he wasn't
just like um as gaulked at as he would be without,
you know, wearing a hat and a hood and all that. Um.
But his his rationale was that people are going to
stare anyway, I might as well charge him for it.
(26:56):
And that's exactly what he did um at that storefront
and in London. And it just so happened, Chuck, that
that storefront was located directly across the street and still
is from the London Hospital and some doctors they're caught
wind of this curiosity who was on exhibit just right
across the street, and they they some of them showed
up to to check it out. He had at one
(27:17):
point he met up with a surgeon who had heard
about his story named Frederick Treeves, and he invited him
to come in for an examination. And this is um,
you know at this point in Merrik had I guess
it was sort of his peak of his deformities in
his troubles. At this point, his head was about thirty
(27:39):
six inches in circumference, that right wrist was about twelve
inches around, and he had those tumors all over his body.
Like we said, a lot of trouble walking and talking.
But when he was examined by by the doctor, he
was like, you know, other than this, you're in pretty
good health. Um. He ended up having a heart problem
later on, but um, he said, other than that, you're
(28:02):
in decent health. And he said, I would like to
present you, if I could, to the Pathological Society of
London and to come in for more exams. And it's
at this point where Merrek um, I think, sort of
cut the notion in his head that listen, I am
getting the same feeling um of being on display in
(28:22):
the storefront, and I don't like how it feels. I
think one of his quotes was the experience made him
feel like an animal in a cattle market, and he said,
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go from showing myself
in the storefront to being paraded around in front of
a bunch of doctors for some sort of yeah, some
(28:42):
sort of weird medical experiment. Yeah. So so Treats like
very clearly identified, Um, Joseph Merrick is a really great
case study that Treats could make his his name on,
and ultimately he did. Um. But when he asked Joseph
to come back for more tests and more displays and
demonstrations in in, Joseph declined. Apparently Tribes was very upset
(29:07):
by this, and then a lot of people say not coincidentally,
but it's never been proven that he had any hand
in it whatsoever. Shortly after he was rebuffed or he
rebuffed Trees invitation again. Um, the elephant Man exhibit was
shut down by police. London outlawed that particular exhibit. On
the one hand, it makes sense because Victorian society it
(29:30):
kind of started to come to see side shows or
freak shows as they were called at the time, as
really exploitive and distasteful, even ones where the person on
display was a willing participant, and then other people think
well it was revenged by treats. He he was kind
of that kind of person potentially to do something petty
like that. But however it happened his show got shut down,
(29:52):
and he found himself pretty well off, like you said,
like he had a lot of money, he just wasn't
living very well. He was living in an iron bed
in a cold storefront. And he said, you know, I've
always wanted to go see Europe the continent, and uh,
I'm I'm going to go try my hand in Belgium
and see what they think of my exhibit. And so
we moved to Belgium for a while and started up
in exhibit there. Yeah, so in Belgium is where um
(30:17):
he had some sort of ups and downs. He was
ended up being robbed by a manager there who took
him on and he took basically all the money that
he had saved, and it was it was a good
amount of money, um, you know, And that's I think
that's kind of how we know that he had some
uh some decent success and made a decent living back
in the UK. And in eighty six he goes back
(30:41):
to England and once he's there, he goes back to
the London Hospital. They say that this is an incurable
thing that you have and uh. There was a letter
published in The Times from the chairman of the hospital,
Francis carr Goam, that said, UM that talked about his
case basic lee and said, hey, if there's if there's
(31:01):
anyone out there that thinks they could help this man, Um,
please get in touch with us. There was a big
outpouring of support, mainly financial UM, which really helped Merik
out because, like I said, he had his life savings
taken and was definitely a hard luck case at this
point financially and he was able to use that money
UM basically to live on for the rest of his life. Yeah. Yeah,
(31:25):
I mean, like there's a story that that Um Treeves
said in his memoirs. Like I said before, there's only
two surviving pieces of contemporary writing about Joseph Merrick. One
is the Memoirs of Frederick Trieves his his doctor the
man who ended up becoming his doctor, and then the
other was the pamphlet written um in part by Joseph
(31:46):
Merrick about his life that was handed out at the
side show. But in tribes Memoirs, he recounts a story
that Um, Joseph was so bad off when he finally
found passage back after being abandoned, beaten, robbed, in belled him.
When he found passage back to UK, he couldn't even
speak um with either because he was just so so
(32:07):
shattered by the experience or because um his the bony
protrusions in his mouth had progressed so much. But regardless
of the police supposedly found a business card of Frederick
Trieve's on him and they took Joseph to Frederick Treeves
so he was kind of at least according to trus
memoirs delivered by Providence, back into Tree's hands. And then yeah,
(32:30):
at the hospital they were kind of like, look, you know,
this is a really sad story, but he's an incurable
there's nothing that we can do about. He's got to go.
And if it hadn't have been for Francis car Gone
basically turning out and saying like, hey, we don't know
what a go fund me is yet, but this is
basically what we're going to do. And the response that
he got was just so massive that that yeah, they
(32:52):
basically said, Okay, there's enough money here now that you
can live here for the rest of your life if
you want to. And one of the big things that
really kicked it off, uck was a visit from Alexandra
or Alexander. Yeah, Alexandra, um Princess of Wales, and the
Princess of Wales title is what Princess Die or Kate
Middleton have now has has now Like it's a big
(33:13):
deal title in the royal family. So this is basically
like Princess Die or Princess Kate showing up to visit
him and shake his hand. And so it became very
fashionable among um London's high society to visit Joseph Merrikan
patronize him basically and make sure that he was supported.
And it really gave the last four years of his
life like this amazing boost. Like he went from real
(33:37):
hardship and exploitation to about as cushy a life as
somebody with his medical condition can have and being celebrated
as a as a really interesting good person um by London,
you know, the last few years of his life, which
is a real silver lining to this story. You know, yeah,
we should take our last break here and talk about
(33:58):
those last few years a little bit more after this
m so uh April eleven is when Joseph Merrick finally
(34:36):
passed on, he was twenty seven years old. They found
him lying flat on his back in his bed. So, um,
this article gets it super wrong. Um. From how Stuff Works?
They say that that, um this They quote a historian
from University of You Talk called uh Naja what is
her name? Der Back and she says that it's highly
(34:58):
likely that Merrick committed suicide. And that is almost almost
almost surely incorrect. Um. He the story. The legend goes
that he um, he had he wanted to always sleep
like other people, flat on his back, but he couldn't
because his head was too heavy and it would crush
his windpipe. And that when he was discovered dead in
(35:22):
his bed, he was flat on his back. Um, and
had clearly tried to sleep like that because he wanted
to be like normal people. And I think even in
the David Lynch movie, that's how he dies, isn't it.
I've never seen it. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute,
wait a minute. Really correct? Oh you're gonna love it, dude.
(35:44):
It's one of the better movies ever made. I think
it will be one of your favorites. I'll be very
surprised if you don't absolutely love it. Um, wow, this
I guess this research just spoiled it for you. Huh.
I knew the story, but yeah, I've never seen it
all the way through. Yeah, it's it's a good movie,
but in it, I think that's how they depict his
his demise as well. But if you go back and
you look at the um the postmortem report or the
(36:07):
reports from the port postmortem report, he was actually found
in the middle of the day. He'd already been awakened,
he had been brought lunch at like one thirty pm,
and he was totally fine. But then when another doctor
dropped by on his rounds to see how he was
doing at three pm, he was found dead. And he
was laying across his bed, and they think the way
(36:27):
that he was laying indicated he tried to get up
and either maybe he pulled a muscle or he had
a heart attack or something like that happened and he slipped,
and that's a big deal for him because his head
weeighth twenty pounds and apparently when he went down, his
head twisted just right and and twisted his vertebrae and
(36:48):
killed him like that. So the initial um autopsy said
that he died of dis disconnected or dislocated vertebrae. And
apparently somebody studied his bones in the last of your
years and said, actually, that's that's probably exactly how he died,
based on what his his skeleton looks like still today. Wow.
So after he died, Uh, they they basically took his
(37:14):
flesh from his body. Uh, they boiled down his bones
because they wanted to have those for display and for study,
and they are still on display. And um, they ended
up burying his very unceremoniously buried, um what was left
of him, his organs and his remaining flesh and an
unmarked grave. And there's a lot of speculation whether you
(37:36):
know what kind of relationship he had with Trieves, and
whether or not he really cared for him like he
claimed to, or whether he was just sort of a
doctor exploiting this really um sort of exceptional case. Um.
The reason he's known as John Merrick is because, um,
because Treeves called him that in a book, even though
that wasn't his name. So, UM, there's been a lot
(37:57):
of speculation about the true nature there. Yeah, there's a
there's another author um quoted in this house stuff works
article named Joanne Vigor Mungo Vin. She's a she's a
written at least one book on on Joseph Merrick. And
she um actually found his grave has lost unmarked grave
(38:18):
and confirmed that he had been buried in consecrated ground
in a common grave, which apparently was common in those
two in those days, like people have been buried in
that grave before him, and people were buried in that
grave after him. Um. But it was in consecrated ground
in an actual cemetery, wasn't like tossed in a ditch
like right outside the medical school or anything like that. Um.
And so she made sure that he got a marker
(38:39):
UM put up on that grave in the last I
think the last couple of years she found it, and
maybe two thou two nineteen, I think even as recent
as that. Wow, that's pretty uh, pretty amazing. And then
one other thing, Chuck, did you do you remember when
Michael Jackson um famously made a bid for the Elephant
Man's bones. I do, except that that did not happen.
(39:03):
That was all just a big cooked up rumor from
a man named Frank Dilio who said that Michael bid
five thousand dollars and then a million dollars on the
bones of the elephant man, who was someone he apparently
felt very akin to and apparently that is not true,
(39:24):
and it was just sort of like the hyperbaric chamber
that that never happened. Uh, and Jackson ended up making
light of it a little bit and uh and they
Leave Me Alone short film by dancing with an animated
version his skeleton. Yeah, so that and that's really weird.
But the thing is, if you go back and search
that there are like associated press articles from about it,
(39:48):
and they they include quotes from people who work at
the London Hospital Medical College who said that they had
had turned down his offers. So it's it's really weird
because I mean I always had heard it was made
up as well. Yeah, I mean I think, um, it's
one of those things where they, i mean, his mom
said it could have even come from ah from him
(40:10):
as far as not actually bidding on them, but just
to make up the story to get in the newspapers. Yeah. So,
I mean one of the things that just wanted to
make sure to drive home is that Joseph Merrik didn't
give up. I think that's why I was so bugged
by the idea that this this historian just so Cavalier
was like it was highly likely he committed suicide, even
though all the evidence points to the idea that he didn't.
(40:32):
But Joseph Merrick lived twenty seven years putting up with
some of the most humiliating, disparaging, terrible treatment that any
humans ever had to endure, and he did it with
like grace and dignity. He like read, and he wrote poetry,
and he like corresponded with people, and he had like
a gentle soft heart. And you know, finally, thanks to
(40:54):
things like you know, the stage play and David Lynch's movie,
he's he's been portrayed accurately in that sense. And I
think that that's great because I think that that's that
will be his legacy forever as somebody who was a
very admirable human being who put up with a lot
more than you know, I probably could have with with
dignity and grace. It's quite a story. Uh well, since
(41:15):
Chuck said is quite a story, that means that that's
it for the Elephant Man, and that it's time for
a listener mail. I'm gonna call this the ghost story.
Recently for the Halloween, we rereleased our ghost episode and
where I detailed the old lady I saw on Athens
in the middle of the road. And this comes from
Eric King. He said, I I thought i'd share this
(41:38):
with you guys. Uh. In the episode of Unsolved Mysteries
that reminds me of this, there was a motorcyclist named
Robert Davidson who was struck by lightning after pulling to
the side of the road during a storm. When paramedics arrived,
the situation looked grim as a crowd began to gather
around the incident, A mysterious woman in a black dress
holding a bible appeared just like my lady. She bypassed
(42:00):
paramedics and began to pray over Davidson. After a few
tense moments of her chanting and beating her bible in
the ground, he began to show signs of life again.
The woman in the black dress smiled and then disappeared
amongst the crowd. Davidson wound up in a coma for
two months, but came out of it with no uh
no permanent injuries. Upon further investigation, it was found that
(42:22):
the road where he was struck was near a site
that was once a religious community in the mid eighteen hundreds.
The black dress witnesses claimed, Uh, the woman was wearing
a similar outfit to the one on display in a
museum containing artifacts from the site. So Eric says, I
think he thinks I should investigate mine a little bit more.
(42:42):
Maybe there was a similar religious site near there where
I saw the woman in black. And then it's from
Eric King and uh, he and his wife were big,
big listeners. Well thanks a lot, Eric, that was a
great one, appreciated big time. Um, Chuck, you're gonna do
some research. I was actually doing so anyway the other day.
So I'm gonna I'm gonna keep it up. Oh cool man,
what do you have you found anything so far? Nothing? Okay? Well, yeah,
(43:05):
you've got to report back if you find even the
slightest shred of evidence of anything. Okay, of course. Uh. Well,
while we wait for Chuck's report on the source and
origin of his ghosts. Um, we'll leave you to it,
and you can write into us to say hi, and
how's it going with your research? Chuck? Write it in
an email and send it off to Stuff Podcast at
(43:27):
iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
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