Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [118]
Neurofibromatosis occurs in about one in 3,000 people, but the degree of severity varies greatly, and there are very few other cases recorded in which the disfigurement was anything like Merrick’s.
After his death a postmortem was conducted and plaster casts of his limbs were made, so that it is still possible to see how he must have looked. His skeleton, some of the bones horribly swollen and twisted, still stands in the Medical School attached to the London Hospital.
Treves himself received the fame he had always longed for. In 1900 he was appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. But his true moment of glory came in January 1902, when King Edward VII collapsed with appendicitis a few days before his coronation. Treves, as the leading authority on the illness, was called in and insisted on an immediate operation. A battle ensued between the man who was King of his country and the man who was king in his own sphere. Treves was not afraid to stand up to monarchs, and when Edward insisted that he must go through with his coronation the doctor told him, “In that case you will go to the Abbey as a corpse.”
Realizing he had met his match, Edward gave way and Treves performed an emergency operation. It was a success, and he was named a baronet.
By that time he already had a practice that was successful beyond his wildest dreams. The wealthy, the aristocratic—they all flocked to his consulting rooms on Wimpole Street until the house overflowed with them, and Anne declared that the bedroom was the only room she could call her own. But Sir Frederick Treves, who regularly commanded the highest prices and numbered royalty among his friends, would give up Sundays, his only free day, to return to the hospital to see the poor patients in the wards.
In 1908 he retired from active surgical practice and set off on his travels. He and Anne went to Palestine, Uganda, the West Indies, and many other places, and it was then that he began his second career as a writer of travel books. He was still writing in 1920 when failing health forced him to live quietly in Switzerland.
His last years were darkened by the tragedy of his younger daughter’s death, ironically from an attack of appendicitis, the very illness on which he was the supreme authority. He died in 1923, having lived just long enough to see his last book published to excellent reviews. It was called The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences.
The beginning of Treves’ fame can be dated from his championship of the Elephant Man, and there were always voices raised to accuse him of exploitation. But those who knew Treves never doubted the sincerity of his affection for Merrick. If he gained much, he also gave much, and Merrick himself would have been overjoyed to know that his friend had benefited from their association.
To the end of his life, Treves never forgot Merrick, and in his very last book he tried to tell the world the truth about the good man he had discovered trapped inside the body of a monster.
“The spirit of Merrick,” he said, “if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth-browed and clean of limb, and with eyes that flashed undaunted courage.”
Of the Elephant Man’s death, he said this:
“His tortured journey had come to an end. All the way he, like another, had borne on his back a burden almost too grievous to bear. He had been plunged into the Slough of Despond, but with manly steps had gained the farther shore. He had been made ‘a spectacle to all men’ in the heartless streets of Vanity Fair. He had been ill-treated and reviled and bespattered with the mud of Disdain. He had escaped the clutches of the Giant Despair, and at last had reached the ‘Place of Deliverance’ where ‘his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell from his back, so that he saw it no more.’ ”*
* Quotations from Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.
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