After an unsuccessful trip to Belgium, Merrick returned to London and was eventually brought to the London Hospital. Unable to care for Merrick, the chairman of the hospital published a letter asking for public support. The resulting donations allowed the hospital to convert several rooms into living quarters for Merrick, where he would be cared for the rest of his life. He died from a broken vertebra on April 11, 1890, at the age of 27.
Joseph Carey Merrick was born on August 5, 1862, in Leicester, England, and was by all accounts a healthy child at birth. However, by the age of 5, he had developed patches of lumpy, grayish skin, which his parents attributed to his mother having been frightened by a stampeding elephant during her pregnancy. As Merrick grew older, he developed more severe deformities, until head and body were covered with various bony and fleshy tumors. Yet despite these infirmities, Merrick had a relatively normal childhood and attended the local school.
In 1873, when Merrick was just 11 years old, his mother died of bronchial pneumonia. Merrick would later describe her passing as the “greatest sadness in my life.” His father remarried to their landlady less than a year later, and Merrick left school to seek work, eventually finding a job rolling cigars in a factory. But within two years, his right hand had become so deformed that he could no longer do the work and was forced to leave. His father, who owned a haberdashery, attained a peddler’s license for him and sent him out to the streets to sell his shop’s wares. By this point, however, Merrick’s deformities were so extreme, and his speech so impaired as a result, that people were either frightened of him or unable to understand him, and his efforts were met with little success. When one day his father beat him severely for not earning enough money, Merrick went to live with an uncle briefly before becoming a resident at the Leicester Union Workhouse at age 17. Merrick found life in the workhouse intolerable, but unable to find any other means of supporting himself, he was forced to stay.
In 1884, Merrick decided to try to profit from his deformities and escape life in the workhouse. He contacted Sam Torr, the proprietor of a Leicester music hall called the Gaiety Palace of Varieties, and they devised a plan to secure him a spot in a human oddities show. Merrick was soon exhibited as “The Elephant Man, Half-Man, Half-Elephant” to great success in Leicester and Nottingham before eventually traveling to London that November. He wore a cape and veil to conceal his deformities in public, but was often harassed by mobs as he traveled. In London, the Elephant Man exhibit was housed across the street from the London Hospital and was frequently visited by medical students and doctors interested in Merrick’s condition.
Merrick was eventually invited by a surgeon named Frederick Treves to visit the hospital to be examined. The results of Treves’ examination showed that, by that point, Merrick’s deformities had become extreme. His head measured 36 inches in circumference and his right hand 12 inches at the wrist. His body was covered with tumors, and his legs and hip were so deformed that he had to walk with a cane. He was found to be in otherwise good health. Treves presented Merrick to the Pathological Society of London in December of that year, and asked Merrick to visit the hospital for further examination. But Merrick refused, later recalling that the experience made him feel like “an animal in a cattle market.”
By 1885, a distaste for freak shows had developed in Britain and Merrick and his managers decided to try to move The Elephant Man exhibit to Belgium. The show met with only mediocre success, however, and Merrick’s manager there eventually robbed him of his life savings and abandoned him. After finding passage on a ship back to England in June 1886, Merrick was mobbed by a crowd at Liverpool Street Station in London and taken into custody by the poli
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