The True History of the Elephant Man

Joseph Carey Merrick, born in Leicester on 5th August 1852, is better known as the Elephant Man. Through horrible physical deformities which were almost impossible to describe, he spent much of his life exhibited as a fairground freak until even nineteenth-century sensibilities could take no more. Hounded, persecuted and starving, he ended up one day at Liverpool Street Station where he was rescued, housed and fed by the distinguished surgeon Frederick Treves. To Treves' surprise, he discovered