The Wheelchair Historian

Friday, 4 December 2020

Joseph Merrick A.K.A. "The Elephant Man"

By UnknownI (User:Belovedfreak) have emailed the Royal London Hospital Archives to request information regarding the author. The Trust Archivist for Barts and The London NHS Trust has confirmed that they do not know the name of the photographer, and no such name is included on the carte de visite. - Photograph downloaded from Sideshow Wiki (direct image link)The image hosted at the Sideshow Wiki is a copy of an original carte de visite of Joseph Merrick that is owned by Royal London Hospital Archives.Royal London Hospital ref: RLHLH/P/3/24/2.The carte de visite in the Royal London Hospital Archives had been in the possession of the Rev. H. Tristram Valentine, who was Chaplain at the London Hospital from 1885–1889., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15533733

Welcome to what will probably be my last post in my series on the 19th century freak show, for now at least. This week, we are leaving the land known as the United States of America and heading across possibly the biggest “pond” in the world, to good old England. You see, I will be discussing none other than Joseph Carey Merrick, better known as “The Elephant Man”. Some of you may be thinking, “I thought his name was John Merrick”. Let me try and clear it up. Frederick Treves, the doctor who looked after Merrick, mistakenly recorded his name as John in his 1923 memoir. As a result, the play and movie about Merrick’s life used the name John.

Why Was He Called “The Elephant Man”?

Joseph Merrick was born in Leicester, England on 5 August 1862. For all intents and purposes, he was a perfectly healthy baby. However, when he was roughly 2 years old, strange things started to happen. His lip started to swell and darkened skin growths appeared on his body, becoming bumpy and rough. Furthermore, lumps began to grow under Joseph’s skin, particularly on his chest, neck, and back of the head. When he was 5, things became much worse. The size of his head had grown greatly, predominantly on the right side. Extra skin had grown and was hanging down from the back and side of his head. As he grew, his jaw became deformed, making his speech difficult and almost unintelligible.

Merrick’s parents believed his deformity was caused by a close encounter Joseph’s mother had with an elephant when she was pregnant. She was at a fairground when a stampeding elephant knocked her over. That experience must have been terrifying, I’m sure you will agree. However, how did this incident cause Joseph’s deformities? It didn’t, but that’s not what they thought. At that time, they believed in something called maternal impression. This will be getting a blog post to itself, but I will explain it briefly here. They believed that while a woman was pregnant, the baby was easily influenced by the outside world. If the woman was startled at ANY stage of pregnancy, the resulting shock could alter the baby’s appearance. So, if you are frightened by a man with one arm, your baby will have one arm. If you get knocked over by an elephant, your baby will look like an elephant. You get the idea. Basically, pregnant women were like photocopiers.

As he got older, Merrick’s right arm and hand ballooned in size, eventually rendering it practically useless. So, what was the cause of these deformities? We may think we are scientifically advanced now, but it was not until 1996 that scientists believe they discovered what condition Joseph Merrick had. At first it was thought to be Elephantiasis, but this was ruled out. In 1976, it was suggested that severe neurofibromatosis was the cause. This disorder causes tumours to grow on the nervous system. However, Merrick’s problem was skin and bone overgrowths, so neurofibromatosis is unlikely. In 1996, Amita Sharma, a radiologist examined x-rays and CT scans of Merrick’s bones and concluded that he had Proteus syndrome, a disorder which was only identified in 1979. The disorder is identifiable by the following, all of which Merrick had: multiple lesions, overgrowth of one side of the body, an abnormally large head, partial giantism of the feet, as well as darkened spots on the skin.

A Tough Life

You may want to brace yourselves. Unlike some of the people I have discussed recently, Joseph Merrick did not have a happy life. Sure, everyone I have discussed so far was disabled and displayed for public entertainment, but most of them became rich and had happy lives. This unfortunately was not the case with Merrick. Where to begin? Merrick’s mother looked after him as best she could, and he even attended school like everybody else. However, when Joseph was 11, his mother died of bronchial pneumonia. Within a year, his father married their landlady. This is an excellent case of the wicked stepmother. She was not at all sympathetic to Joseph’s plight and made him leave school to find employment. He found a job rolling cigars in a factory, but within two years his right hand became so deformed that he was not able to carry out the task.

His father owned a haberdashery and acquired a peddler’s licence for Joseph, so he could sell to the public. However, by this time, his deformities were so severe that anyone he approached were either terrified of him or couldn’t understand what he was saying. As a result, Joseph sold hardly anything. Frustrated by this, his father gave Joseph a beating. Joseph left home to escape his father and stepmother and moved in with his uncle. He continued to try to sell goods to the public until his license was revoked, as his appearance continuously scared away potential customers.

At the age of 17, Merrick was forced to enter the Leicester Union Workhouse. A workhouse was a last resort and they were built with this in mind. The objective of those who ran workhouses was to make life in them much worse than life outside them. It is safe to say that Merrick got the hint. He hated life inside the workhouse so much, that in 1884 he decided to join a human oddities show, as they were called then. He figured that people were already staring at him, so he might as well earn a living from it. Merrick contacted Sam Torr, the owner of a Leicester music hall and they devised a plan to get him into a human oddities show. Merrick was exhibited as “The Elephant Man, Half-Man, Half-Elephant” and was very successful in Leicester and Nottingham. He eventually came to the attention of Tom Norman (who was essentially the English equivalent of P.T. Barnum) and put on display in London. Merrick wore a cape and veil to disguise his deformities in public, but he was often harassed by mobs.

Merrick's Hat and Hood (Wikimedia Commons)

The Elephant Man exhibit was situated across the street from the London Hospital, so several doctors and medical students would visit to see Merrick and his condition. One of these was a surgeon named Frederick Treves. He invited Merrick over to the hospital, so that he could examine him properly. Treves discovered that Merrick’s deformities were extreme, the circumference of his head was 36 inches in diameter and his right wrist was 12 inches in diameter. As well as this, his legs were so deformed that he had to walk with a cane. Treves wanted Merrick to attend the hospital again for further examination, but he refused as it made him feel like “an animal in a cattle market.”

In 1885 Merrick was forced to move to Belgium as freak shows had lost their appeal in England. While there, things went from bad to worse. His manager stole his life savings and abandoned him. Merrick managed to make it back to England in June 1886, but he was mobbed by a crowd upon arrival in London and arrested. The police could not understand him but found Treves’ business card in his pocket and brought him to the London Hospital. Treves examined Merrick again and was shocked by how badly his condition had deteriorated. He was deemed to be an ‘incurable’ and therefore could not be treated by the hospital. After failing to find another hospital willing to take him, Francis Carr Gromm, the chairman of the hospital, appealed to the public for help. The money that was raised as a result meant that several rooms in the hospital could be converted into accommodation for Merrick in 1887.

Merrick spent his time conversing with Treves, who was one of the few people who could understand him. He also took several trips to the countryside. He spent the rest of his life in the hospital and was well cared for. On 11 April 1890, Joseph Merrick was found dead lying in his bed. Due to the size of his head, he always slept upright, with his head resting on his knees. It is believed that he was experimenting with lying down when the immense weight of his head broke his neck. He was only 27 years old, which surprised me, as I always imagined him to be middle-aged for some reason.

I think it is safe to say that Joseph Merrick had a difficult life. It is fascinating to see how the public and medical professionals reacted to him though.

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Next week I will be moving away from people and towards to realm of ideas. By that I mean, I will be starting my series on the history of beliefs surrounding disability. Fingers crossed it won't be as dark and depressing!

The Wheelchair Historian

Friday, 27 November 2020

William Henry Johnson A.K.A. Zip the Pinhead

Zip the Pinhead Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=646946

Welcome to my latest blog post on disability as entertainment, specifically the freak show of the 19^th century. So far, I have discussed P.T. Barnum, General Tom Thumb, as well as Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins. This week it is the turn of Zip the Pinhead. As with everything I cover, it is far more complicated than I initially anticipated.

What is a Pinhead?

Pinheads were a common feature in 19^th and early 20^th century freak shows. Pinhead was the term used to refer to a person born with the condition microcephaly. This is a neurological disorder which means that the head fails to grow at the same rate as the face. This results in the top of the head being much narrower than the face. As the person grows older, the size difference becomes more apparent. In a majority of instances, the size of the person’s body is also smaller than average. Furthermore, the mental capacity can be reduced too, delaying motor functions and speech. As you may have guessed, the term Pinhead is not an acceptable one anymore.

I ran (well not literally) into several problems when researching ‘Zip the Pinhead’. You see, there was more than one of them. The man I was looking for, and the one I will be discussing later, was William Henry Johnson. However, he was not the only one, but perhaps he was the most famous. To further complicate things, he was also known as ‘What is It?’. The idea was that he was so strange looking, it was impossible to tell whether he was human or an animal. This name arose when Charles Dickens attended one of Barnum’s exhibits. Perplexed at what he saw, he leaned over and asked Barnum “What is it?”

There had been other iterations of ‘What is it?’ before William Johnson arrived on the scene. The most famous of these was a legless man in London by the name of Harvey Leech. Unfortunately for Barnum, Leech was an actor, who had appeared in plays, and the people of London easily identified him. Johnson was a more successful attempt at duping the public.

The life of William Henry Johnson

William Henry Johnson was a black man born in the 1840s in Liberty Corners, near Bound Brook, New Jersey. He was the son of former slaves, William and Mahalia Johnson. He was believed to be between four and five feet tall and his head was an unusual shape. The top of his head was narrower than the bottom. This attracted some attention, and the nearby Van Emburgh’s Circus came calling to add Johnson to their sideshow.

In 1860, P.T. Barnum came across Johnson and decided to take him on. As can be expected, Barnum had an elaborate backstory for his new performer. He shaved Johnson’s head, leaving only a small tuft of hair at the top. He also changed his name to Zip the Pinhead. It is only when I started to do my research that I discovered this topic has more to do with race than disability. The origin of the name Zip is most likely from “Zip Coon”, an early minstrel show character, who for white people came to personify the stereotypically dumb but dapper black person. Thinking along these lines, Barnum dressed Johnson in a fur suit and stated that he had been found along the Gambia River in West Africa. He was thought to be part of a tribe that was the missing link between monkey and man. As well as being called Zip the Pinhead and “What is it?”, he was given the names “The Monkey-Man” and “The Missing Link”. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, so evolution was the hot topic of the day.

For several years, Johnson was presented on stage in a cage (hey, that rhymes). His job was to act like a monkey to entertain people. So I guess you could say that he was in a rage, in a cage, on a stage! Barnum paid him $1 a day not to speak, which Johnson happily agreed to, becoming rich in the process. Instead of speaking, he would grunt every time he was addressed. I know it sounds pretty bad, but Johnson seems to have enjoyed performing. He did so until he was in his 80s. In fact, when he got bronchitis and influenza in 1926, he ignored the advice of doctors, his manager, and his sister to rest. He insisted on finishing the run of the play he was in. He died a few weeks later, on 9 April 1926 in Bellevue Hospital, New York. His funeral was attended by several of his fellow performers and he was the longest serving freak show attraction.

How Intelligent was Zip?

There has been some debate as to how intelligent William Henry Johnson was. Robert Bogdan, in his 1988 book, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit thinks that he had reduced intelligence due to a diagnosis of microcephaly. However, since then opinions have changed. I for one feel that Johnson was not mentally deficient. Here’s why.

While his head was an unusual shape, it was not as pronounced as others with microcephaly. In fact, by shaving his head, Barnum made it look much worse than it actually was. Johnson also showed several signs of intelligence. For instance, he held up the act of not speaking for over 60 years, even though his sister reported that he was capable of holding conversations. If he was not able to speak, Barnum would not have had to pay him $1 a day. I think he had to be intelligent not to break character for such a long period. Furthermore, he acquired a fiddle on his travels which he played for several years. Apparently, he was so bad at playing it that observers and even fellow performers would pay him to stop. He made $14,000 by doing this. If he was not intelligent, he may have either stopped playing entirely or kept playing and not taken the money.

Near the end of his life Johnson performed at the Coney Island freak show. One Sunday afternoon in 1925, while out walking on his break, Johnson heard a girl screaming. It was a seven-year-old who had fallen into the water. Johnson (in his 80s) quickly jumped in and rescued the girl, immediately running away as a crowd gathered around her. Finally, his last words to his sister on his deathbed were reported to be “Well, we fooled ‘em for a long time”. This suggests that he may have been an (incredibly wealthy) actor playing a role for most of his life.

To keep up to date with my latest blog posts, you can like my Facebook page, or follow me on Twitter. You can find them by clicking the relevant icons in the sidebar.

Next week I will be examining the life of ‘The Elephant Man’, Joseph Merrick.

The Wheelchair Historian

Further Reading

Bogdan, Robert, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

CandyGuy, ‘ZIP THE PINHEAD – What is it?’ https://www.thehumanmarvels.com/zip-the-pinhead-what-is-it/ Accessed: 27^th November 2020.

Fact Index, ‘Zip the Pinhead’ http://www.fact-index.com/z/zi/zip_the_pinhead.html Accessed: 27th November 2020.

Gerber, David A., ‘Volition and Valorization in the Analysis of the ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows’, Disability, Handicap & Society, Vol.7, No.1, 1992.

Newspapers.com, ‘Zip the Pinhead ("Barnum's What-Is-It") saves a life.’ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/17123705/zip-the-pinhead-barnums-what-is-it/ Accessed: 27th November 2020.

WeirdNJ.com, ‘Zip The “What Is It?”’ https://weirdnj.com/stories/local-heroes-and-villains/zip-the-what-is-it/ Accessed: 27^th November 2020.