Last Years
On three occasions Merrick left the hospital and London on holiday, spending a few weeks at a time in the countryside. Through elaborate arrangements that allowed Merrick to board a train unseen and have an entire carriage to himself, he travelled to Northamptonshire to stay at Fawsley Hall, the estate of Lady Louisa Knightley. He stayed at the gamekeeper's cottage and spent the days walking in the estate's woods, collecting wild flowers. He befriended a young farm labourer who later recalled Merrick as an interesting and well-educated man. Treves called this "the one supreme holiday of life", although in fact there were three such trips.
Merrick's condition gradually deteriorated during his four years at the London hospital. He required a great deal of care from the nursing staff and spent much of his time in bed, or sitting in his quarters, with diminishing energy. His facial deformities continued to grow and his head became even more enlarged. He died on 11 April 1890, at the age of 27. At around three o'clock in the afternoon, Treves' house surgeon visited Merrick and found him lying dead across his bed. His body was formally identified by his uncle, Charles Merrick. An inquest was held on 15 April by Wynne Edwin Baxter, who had come to notoriety conducting inquests for the Whitechapel murders of 1888.
He often said to me that he wished he could lie down to sleep 'like other people' ... he must, with some determination, have made the experiment ... Thus it came about that his death was due to the desire that had dominated his life—the pathetic but hopeless desire to be 'like other people'.
“ ” —Frederick TrevesMerrick's death was ruled accidental and the certified cause of death was asphyxia, caused by the weight of his head as he lay down. Treves, who performed an autopsy on the body, said that Merrick had died of a dislocated neck. Knowing that Merrick had always slept sitting upright, out of necessity, Treves came to the conclusion that he must have "made the experiment", attempting to sleep lying down, trying to sleep like other people.
Treves dissected Merrick's body and took plaster casts of his head and limbs. He took skin samples, which were later lost during the Second World War, and mounted his skeleton, which remains in the pathology collection at the Royal London Hospital. Although the skeleton has never been on public display, there is a small museum dedicated to his life, housing some of his personal effects.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Merrick
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?”
—Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898)
“I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)