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FREAKS
:
Human Skeletons |
Date
Added
MAR 2004 |
In August 1979, a rakish, enfeebled woman from North London shed a few
more pounds in weight and died. That month, like many previous
months, she had set herself a new slimming target. She
considered herself grossly overweight and had been sticking rigidly to
a diet of black coffee during the day, a slice of toast or perhaps a
small bowl of soup in the evening with a weekly 'treat' of two
spoonfuls of potato and maybe, when she felt extra-specially
adventurous, a thin slice of cold chicken.
She was 5 feet and 3 inches tall yet well under 6 stones in weight
when she died, aged 31. In an almost macabre ritual, she had
insisted on keeping a detailed diary of her daily fight against the
imagined flab, often chastising herself for failing to lose a few more
pounds and ounces and vowing to eat and drink even less in a pathetic
effort to be perfectly thin.
In Britain alone, one in every 200 adolescent girls suffers at some
stage from the perplexing syndrome which killed that woman: anorexia
nervosa, or as it has more popularly come to be known , 'slimmers'
disease'. The figure is twice as high for girls aged 16 or more
who are at university or in private higher education. The stark
medical fact is that 15 out of every 100 sufferers will die, 35 will
endure relapses and only 50 - half the total- will completely recover.
Slimmers' disease is far removed from the Victoria peep show world of
the human skeleton; instead, psychologists believe, it is an
aberration of 20th century life's intense peer group and media
pressure on women, and especially teenage girls, to slim and slim
again, to stay young and beautiful and so not only to attract the
opposite sex but also, though it is never explained quite why, become
a better person.
Young girls, battered by glossy advertisements and myriad slimming
guides, have been known to suffer incredible and sometimes lethal
weight losses as they take crash diets to dangerous extremes, each
lost pound fuelling the belief that they can and must lose more.
Models, film stars and pop singers have been categorised as high risk
professions and there are literally hundreds of cases of women in
these fields who, before the constant gaze of the public, have fallen
victim to anorexia.
One famous personality, who became consumed with a desire to cut her
intake of food to bare subsistence level to achieve what she believed
would be a ravishing hour-glass figure, starved herself virtually to
the brink of death. The efforts of doctors, a long period of
recuperation in a private clinic and help from a leading psychiatrist
eventually broke her obsessive need to fast.
There are few genuine human skeletons who enjoy good health along with
their lean times. Many of the freaks exhibited in Victorian
England and across America did, in fact suffer from acute muscular
atrophy; their withered, limp limbs but perfectly normal, adult sized
heads often giving them the appearance of being grotesquely shaped
dwarfs. One such tragic figure was a woman called Rosa Lee
Plemons, whose hideously atrophied body weighed only 27 pounds when
she was 18 years old.
Perhaps the most celebrated human skeleton was a little Welshman named
Hopkin Hopkins, who never weighed more than 17 pounds during his life
as a freak on show in his native country in London. In the three
years prior to his death in Glamorganshire in March 1754, at the age
of 17, his weight had remained at a static 12 pounds. It is
believed that he suffered from precocious development, that rare and
cruel disease that causes the ageing process of youngsters to speed
out of control until they die, pitifully, of old age before they are
out of their teens. Hopkin Hopkins' parents had six other
children, all of whom were of sound health apart from a 12 year old
sister, who weighed a mere 18 pounds and was showing signs of
beginning to wither and age rapidly on the death of her brother.
In total contrast, J.W. Coffey, who became a hugely successful star on
the peep show circuit, became know as - and, indeed, lived like - the
'King of the Human Skeletons'. He was renowned among his friends
and show-business colleagues as a voracious eater whose hefty appetite
startled men many times his weight. Despite his skeletal stature
- his bones and joints were clearly visible jutting out under taunt,
seemingly elasticated skin - he was always t enjoy superb health and
his jolly demeanour, which would have been more appropriate perhaps to
one of the roly-poly fatties who human skeletons were often staged
alongside, became the talk of Victorian voyeurs who flocked to see him
at circuses and penny museums throughout the country. |
Claude Suerat, borned in 1798 |
Another human skeleton, who was brought to England in 1825, certainly
didn't share his contemporary's appetite for plentiful fare.
Frenchman Claude Seurat's humble diet consisted of a meagre penny roll
and a few thimble-sized sips of wine. Seurat, who was born in
1798 and so did not hit the lucrative freak scene in England until he
was 27 years old, had truly astonishing physical dimensions. The
distance from his chest to his spine - measured, of course, from the
outside of his body, was only 3 inches. The circumference of his
biceps was a mere 4 inches and, with his skeletal frame plainly
visible under his tightly-stretched skin, peep show customers were
alarmed, amused and amazed actually to see his heartbeats!
Seurat's voice was said to have been incredibly weak
and shrill and he was, of course, a very feeble man. Yet he
enjoyed perfect health all his life, despite his miniscule daily
intake of sustenance, slept well and, according to doctors who
observed him, seemed not in the least worried about his frailty and
had no desire to be helped or improved by being fattened-up.
American soldier Calvin Edon, who served a 25 year old trooper in 1813
at the battle of Plattsburg during the war against the British, became
famous as a human skeleton in a bizarre way. After the long and
bloody battle, fought in bitterly cold conditions, he simply
collapsed, completely exhausted and numb from the appalling weather.
At the time, he was a healthy 125 pounds. But, almost instantly
and for no apparent reason, he began to lose weight alarmingly.
No matter what he did or ate, he could not arrest the amazing
automatic diet. Seventeen years after the battle his weight had
more than halved to a scant 60 pounds. Yet no matter how lightly
he topped the scales, he retained his strength and perfect health.
By 1830, Edson, who was by then a father of four, could chop huge
piles of wood, despite the fact that his 5 feet and four inches
carried just a bundle of flesh and bones.
The lightest ever human being on record was Lucia Zarate, who weighed
2 1/2 pounds at her birth in San Carlos, Mexico, on January 2nd 1863.
By her seventeenth birthday, she had gained only another 2 pounds in
weight! The emaciated girl, who was also a dwarf who stood only
26 1/2 inches high, actually began to fill out a little more after
that - by her 20th birthday she was pleased to be tipping the scales
at 13 pounds! Lucia's frail little life came to an end in
October 1889, when she died at the age of 26, still weighing only 14
pounds.
Bag of bones freaks enjoyed great success and had huge followings
during the heyday of the peep show and were often exhibited under such
spectacular and quasi-medical sounding names as 'The Ossified Man'.
Edward C. Hagner, who was born in America and lived from 1892 to 1962,
relished his Wild West Style handle of 'The Skeleton Dude'.
Standing 5 feet and 7 inches high, he is said to have weighed at his
peak a paltry 3 stones and 6 pounds of skin and bones.
Rare diseases are known to have caused staggering losses of up to 65
per cent of body weight in people. The shrunken frame of Emma
Shaller, who was born in St Louis, Missouri, on 8th July 1868 and died
22 years later, weighed only 3 stones and 3 pounds. Emma, who
stood 5 feet and 2 inches tall, had been an average weight for her
height until she contracted the extremely rare disease Hypophysical
cachexia - known as Simmonds' disease. Like anorexia nervosa the
disease causes rapid weight loss, often over a very short period.
Today it would be callous and unimaginable to seek to exploit as human
skeletons and freaks the many hundreds of thousands of emaciated
little figures which have touched the consciences of us all:
grief stricken figures with no food for their bellies who are the
children of the Third World. Since the flood of pictures of
skeletal Biafran infants began to flow in the 1960s into the torrent
from Vietnam, Kampuchea and elsewhere, this subject which may have
caused so much mawkish pleasure in the days of showpiece Victoriana at
it best, now perhaps evokes feelings closer to the heart. |
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