Fredrick Treves

(1853 - 1923)

Fredrick Treves was a physician and the author of The Elephant Man, based on the life of a man named Merrick. Apparently a healthy child, Merrick began to manifest strange symptoms around the age of five, the size of his head swelling to a diameter of three feet. He was placed in a workhouse at the age of seventeen and escaped four years later, working in a freak show until Treves admitted him to London Hospital in 1886. Merrick died there at the age of twenty-six in 1890.