The incredible story of the Elephant Man – Part 1

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012 6:41:27 by

Joseph Merrick is widely considered one of the most unfortunate human beings in history, his radical deformity, the most severe ever recorded in a living human being, sentenced him to a life of ostracism.

"I saw the light for the first time on August 5, 1860. I was born in Lee Street, Leicester. The deformity which I display now is because an elephant frightened my mother before I was born, she walked down the street as there marched a procession of animals.
There was a huge crowd gathered to see the procession, and unfortunately my mother was pushed under the legs of an elephant. She was very scared. At that time, she was pregnant with me, and this misfortune was the cause of my deformity."

The above passage was written by Joseph Carey Merrick in an attempt to describe his disease. In his touching innocence, the young Englishman, who knows nothing about birth defects or dominant genes transmitted hereditarily, attributes the blame for his devastating
disease to a single animal.

Born in August 1860 in Leicester, England. He was a normal child until the age of 5 years that began to develop a rare disease that progressively deformed body parts. His mother took care of him and protected him until her death due to bronchitis in 1871.
In 1874 his father remarried a widow who had two sons, and she despised and hated Joseph because of his increasingly pronounced deformity. In his autobiography Merrick describes the tortures he was subjected by this woman, he writes that he was made a target
to abuse for years as an orphan child, seriously ill and horribly disabled.

When she left home permanently, Joseph went to the hospital in Leicester where he operated a bump that was starting to cause problems with eating. He stayed in the hospital for two or three years but was forced out, because in those days, hospitals housed
chronically ill.

The only option Merrick had for a living was to become an entertainer and display himself as a phenomenon in an exhibition of atrocities, exposing on stage all his hideous appearance to the delight and amazement of passers unbelievers, so that made contact
with an employer who, on sight, hired him.

To be continued….

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