Joseph Merrick

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Joseph Merrick, photographed for a study in 1889

Joseph Carey Merrick (born August 5, 1862 in Leicester , † April 11, 1890 in London ) was known in the Victorian era as the elephant man (English "Elephant Man").

Merrick suffered from severe deformations of his body that completely disfigured his form and face. In the Victorian era it was regarded as the worst example of the pathological deformation of the human face.

Life

Merrick's deformities were not recognizable when he was born, but began to develop from the age of 21 months and to develop more from the age of 5. At first he attended a normal school. When his mother Mary Jane Merrick died of pneumonia on May 19, 1873, she left Joseph and his two younger siblings William Arthur and Marion Eliza. His father changed his place of residence and soon afterwards married his landlady, who brought her own children into the marriage and had little sympathy for Joseph. She urged her husband to cast Joseph out of the family environment. With the help of his uncle Charles Merrick, Joseph initially found work at Messrs. Freeman's Cigar Manufacturers , but soon had to give it up again because his right hand had become too heavy and misshapen to make cigars. After some little fruitful tests as street traders Merrick went as a "monster" with the participation of Tom Norman on Fairs .

In November 1886, Joseph Merrick was in London, where he attention of the surgeon Frederick Treves excited, who examined him and up a report (in which he for Merrick the name "John Merrick" began) wrote that later in the British Medical Journal published has been.

Since the displays were repeatedly banned by the authorities, Merrick traveled with his manager to Belgium, from where he returned of his own accord in December 1886. On arrival in London, he was ambushed and robbed of his savings of £ 50 (the equivalent of around € 6,000 in 2007 spending power). The only way he could save in this desperate situation was a visiting card from Treves, whom he sought out for help. Treves granted him admission to the London Hospital. Merrick's stay was later funded by the Joseph Merrick Fund, made with donations from readers of the London Times .

Treves describes Merrick as an intelligent, if childishly naive, person with a pleasant character. His language was so impaired by his deformity that only a few people who had regular contact with him were able to understand him.

Merrick died unexpectedly on April 11, 1890. He was in good physical condition in the morning and found dead on his bed in the afternoon. It is believed that he suffered a stroke or minor heart attack that caused him to fall. Death then occurred by suffocation .

Joseph Merrick was only able to sleep in a squat position due to kyphoscoliosis ( hunched back and lateral curvature of the spine ). On the day of his death, however, Joseph Merrick was found lying on his back in his bed, which he usually avoided. Otherwise, due to its deformations, there was a risk that his heavy head would sink back into the sleeping pad, overstretching the windpipe and pulling the trigger. And it was precisely this that was probably the cause of death - whether it was brought about intentionally or unintentionally cannot be answered.

Occasionally it was suggested that Merrick was Jack the Ripper . However, this assumption has no basis and is completely unfounded: Merrick suffered from severe mobility restrictions due to his malformations , he could not hold an object in his right hand. With the given restrictions, he would have been able to accomplish the rather fine motor actions performed on the killed people only with difficulty and more time-consuming. In addition, his movements and his appearance would have attracted too much attention.

Reasons of deformation

Merrick suffered from a genetic disorder that not only made tremendous changes to the skin, but also made the bones bulky. In this way, with a height of 157 cm, the head (circumference 91 cm), the arms and legs were oversized, only the left hand was not affected by the disease.

During Merrick's lifetime, doctors assumed that he suffered from elephantiasis . In 1971 Ashley Montagu assumed that it was the hereditary disease neurofibromatosis (Recklinghausen disease). In 1979 Michael Cohen discovered the rare Proteus syndrome , which was identified as the cause of Merrick's deformities in 1986. In contrast to Recklinghausen's disease, Proteus syndrome does not affect nerve cells, but tissue cells. A DNA analysis of Merrick's bones and hair in July 2003 confirmed that he was indeed suffering from Proteus Syndrome. However, there were also indications of Recklinghausen's disease.

The previous knowledge about the causes of Joseph Merrick's illness, especially with regard to the thesis that it was Proteus syndrome, are still doubted by some experts. Michael Simpson, geneticist at Guy's Hospital in London, is currently (2013) preparing to investigate the genome of Joseph Merrick and is certain that at least one major cause of the physical deformities stems from a single, non-inherited mutation. The current goal of his preparations is to study the AKT1 gene on chromosome 14. This gene regulates growth in healthy people and is also involved in apoptosis , the programmed cell death, among other things . If this gene does not work or does not work properly, this function is no longer carried out and the observed tissue growth occurs. According to Michael Simpson, it should now be technically possible to provide genetic evidence of the Proteus syndrome thesis.

The problem so far has been that valuable tissue samples were lost during the Second World War and the skeleton had simply been subjected to a wide variety of cleaning procedures far too often and too intensively since the death of Joseph Merrick in 1890. Simpson suspects that Joseph Merrick is one of the rare isolated cases of illness. Simpson has identified 20 such individual cases in the past three years. All of these 20 cases were a point mutation .

Reception in literature and art

Using the example of Merrick's life, the subject of social outsiderhood and tolerance was and is often taken up in art .

Fiction

Gaston Leroux did some research on Joseph Merrick for his novel The Phantom of the Opera .

theatre

Merrick's life became the basis of several plays, with Bernard Pomerance 's 1977 play The Elephant Man becoming the most successful and well-known. The play premiered on Broadway in 1979 ; Merrick was also played by David Bowie in this production . The play became a worldwide success, Joseph Merrick became an important role for actors like Billy Crudup , Bradley Cooper or Maximilian Osterritter . In 2013 , Jörg Buttgereit directed Der Elefantenmensch for Theater Dortmund with Uwe Rohbeck in the title role. Based on the radio play version by Klaus Ude published by Random House Audio , the Hamburg artist group mediabuehne-unart developed a multimedia adaptation as a live radio play with animated film projections , which was premiered in 2015 with Helmut Krauss .

Movie

  • The Elephant Man , American drama from 1980. Written and directed by David Lynch . Despite having the same title, the film is not based on Pomerance's play.
  • From Hell , a film adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel of thesame namefrom 2001. Directed by Albert and Allen Hughes . As in the literary original, Merrick plays only a very small role in the story.

watch TV

  • The Elephant Man , American television film from 1982 and adaptation of Pomerance's play of the same name. Directed by Jack Hofsiss .
  • In the second season of the series Ripper Street (episodes 1 & 2) Merrick appears with other historical people. Among other things, the circumstances of his death in the series episode are interpreted as murder.

music

  • Laurent Petitgirard: Joseph Merrick dit elephant man. Opera in four acts. Le Chant du Monde , Paris 2004 (2 CDs).
  • The American guitarist Buckethead refers to Merrick several times:
    • Song title: The John Merrick Elephant Man Bones Explosion
    • Album title: The Elephant Man's Alarm Clock
  • The American singer Nicole Dollanganger released a song that is heavily based on Joseph Merrick's story:
    • Cries of the Elephant Man Bones
  • Three albums by the American metal band Mastodon each end with a song related to Joseph Merrick:
    • The Elephant Man (Remission)
    • Joseph Merrick (Leviathan)
    • Pendulous Skin (Blood Mountain)
  • The French singer Mylène Farmer deliberately refers to Merrick in the song Psychiatric in her 1991 album L'autre . A line of text from the film is quoted repeatedly by Lynch.
  • In the music video for Leave Me Alone , a song by the American artist Michael Jackson , Merrick is alluded to in a scene in relation to the rumors that Jackson bought Merrick's bones.

literature

  • British Medical Journal, Dec 1886 & April 1890
  • Frederick Treves: The Elephant Man And Other Reminiscences . Cassell and Company Ltd., London 1923.
  • Peter W. Graham: Articulating the elephant man. Joseph Merrick and his interpreters . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md. 1992, ISBN 0-8018-4357-X
  • Michael Howell, Peter Ford: The true history of the elephant man. Penguin Books, London 1980 (and 1992, ISBN 0-14-016515-0 ).
  • Ashley Montagu : The elephant man. A study in human dignity . Arcadian House, Lafayette, La. 2001, ISBN 0-925417-41-6

Web links

Commons : Joseph Merrick  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth certificate ( Memento from January 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Thomas Jansen: Merrick, Joseph Carey. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 972 f.
  3. ^ Peculiarly free: The "Elephant Man": Political enclosures and human zoos
  4. ↑ Joseph Merrick's autobiography
  5. ↑ Short biography of JC Merrick ( Memento from November 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  6. ↑ a b c The Elephant Man And Other Reminiscences , Sir Frederick Treves , Cassell and Company Ltd., 1923
  7. ↑ a b mother of all misery . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 2013, p. 120-122 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Discussion of perpetrators on jacktheripper.de
  9. ↑ Thomas Jansen: Merrick, Joseph Carey. In: Encyclopedia of Medical History. 2005, p. 972.
  10. ^ JAR Tibbles, MM Cohen Jr .: The Proteus syndrome: the elephant man diagnosed. In: British Medical Journal. Volume 293, 1986, pp. 683-685.
  11. ↑ Elephant man mystery unraveled. In: BBC News . July 21, 2003 (English).
  12. Jump up ↑ Review of the theater production by Jörg Buttgereit
  13. ↑ Stefan Reckziegel: The "Elephant Man" live in the Imperial Theater. In: Abendblatt.de. Retrieved March 18, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Cries of the Elephant Man Bones , on nicoledollanganger.bandcamp.com
  15. ^ Swiss Michael Jackson Community. Retrieved May 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Merrick, Joseph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Merrick, Joseph Carey; Merrick, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Englishman who was referred to as the elephant man
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Leicester
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1890
Place of death London