Joseph Merrick

Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), known as "The Elephant Man", is a man who gained the sympathy of Victorian age Britain because of his grotesque deformity. Born in Leicester, he showed signs of deformity by age five and was later rejected by his family and spent much of his life in a circus, as an attraction at a sideshow. His life story became the basis of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play and a film, both called The Elephant Man.

While Joseph Merrick was alive, physicians believed that he suffered from a condition known as elephantiasis. In 1971 Ashley Montagu suggested that Joseph Merrick suffered from type 1 neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder also known as von Recklinghausen's disease, and this disease is still connected with Joseph Merrick in the mind of the public. However, in 1979, Michael Cohen first identified a condition which came to be named Proteus syndrome by Rudolf Wiedemann in 1983. In 1986 it was argued that Proteus syndrome was the condition from which Joseph Merrick actually suffered. Proteus syndrome (named for the shape-shifting god Proteus), unlike neurofibromatosis, affects tissue other than nerves, and is a sporadic rather than familially transmitted disorder. In July 2003, Dr Charis Eng announced that as a result of DNA tests on samples of Merrick's hair and bone, he had determined that Merrick certainly suffered Proteus syndrome, and may have had type 1 neurofibromatosis as well.

Books about or inspired by Joseph Merrick

• The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity - Ashley Montagu
• The True History of the Elephant Man - Michael Howell, Peter Ford
• The Elephant Man - Christine Sparks
• Elephant Man - Bernard Pomerance
• Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters - P. W. Graham, F. H. Oehlschlaeger

Online references

• A BBC story about the results of DNA tests on Merrick's body