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FREAKS
:
The
Monster Makers |
Date
Added
JAN 2004 |
Bertholde, a terribly deformed dwarf,
rose from the lowly rank of court jester to become prime minister of
the sixth century kingdom of Lombardy; from comic freak to feared
politician. Little is known of the origin of this strange,
stunted figure, other than that he was almost certainly a monster made
and not a monster born.
Bertholde, it is widely believed, was a human product of a secret and
sinister organisation which procured slave children and then, using
sickening techniques, turned its terrified little captives into
hideously deformed freaks. In his famous novel, The Man Who
Laughs, Victor Hugo describes the organisation as Comprachicos
(the child-buyers) and says: 'The worked on human beings as the
Chinese work on trees... they could mark a child as though he were a
pocket handkerchief... they produced toys for men.'
In a work published in 1619, Dr Carlo Garcia refers to later sects of
the monster makers as the Dacianos, and says: ' They kidnap children
three or four years old and, breaking their arms and legs, lame and
disfigure them so that they may afterwards sell them to beggars, blind
men and other vagabonds.'
Throughout history, the demand for human freaks has exceeded the
supply and created a nightmarish series of enterprises aimed at
satisfying the public thirst for the bizarre.
The following extract is perhaps the most chilling of Hugo's accounts
of the monster makers:
'In order that a human toy should prove a success, he must be taken in
hand early. The dwarf must be fashioned when young... a
well-formed child is not very amusing, a hunchback is better fun.
Hence grew an art. There were trainers who took a man and made
him an abortion, they took a face and made a muzzle; they stunted
growth, they distorted features. The artificial production of
teratological cases had its rules. It was quite a science; what
one can imagine as the opposite of orthopedy...'
Teratology, the science or study of monstrosities, abnormalities and
malformations in animals, plants and humans, captivated the world long
before the word itself crept into the language.
In ancient Egypt, the demand for dwarfs as court jesters was so great
that the Cairo National Museum today boasts an astonishing collection
of hundreds of figurines of these miniature monsters. Writer and
archaeologist George Ebers describes how they were created, either by
bringing up a child in a box which would cramp and distort its body,
or by strapping it onto a board with its limbs contorted into weird
positions until the bones became fixed out of joint.
In ancient Rome, there was a special market, the Forum Morionum, where
only freak were sold. Plutarch reported that people passed over
beautiful slave girls and boys to buy deformities. Noble and
wealthy ladies assembled huge troupes of freaks, especially midgets
and dwarfs, for a hobby in the same way rich women today might build
up large collections of jewellery or fine furs.
These human toys or work-pets were virtually all products of monster
makers whose techniques may well have been passed on from the Orient.
Centuries earlier, the Chinese had learned that by binding it tightly
from birth, a tiny foot could be produced. Quickly, they leaned
that by binding heads, arms, legs or indeed any part of the body, a
child would develop life long deformities.
Indeed, the unbelievably cruel and inhuman monster making process
continued till comparatively recent times. On 15th May 1878, the
China Mail newspaper reported:
"Young children are bought or stolen at a tender age and place in a
ch'ing or vase with a narrow neck, and having in this case a moveable
bottom. In this receptacle the unfortunately little wretches are
kept for years in a sitting posture, their heads outside being all the
while carefully tended and fed... When the child has reached the age
of twenty or over, he or she is taken away to some distant place and
'discovered' in the woods as a wild man or woman.'
The ancient Romans also experimented in producing dwarfs from stunted
children by dietary deprivation, withholding lime salts, the lack of
which was though to produce rickets. More crudely, the joints of
youngsters intended to become tumblers or contortionists were
skillfully dislocated at an early age. After the fall of Rome,
however, it appears that the art of monster making, as well as the
general interest in freaks, became lost to Europe for more than a
thousand years.
In 1400, as Tamerlane swept through India at the head of his fearsome
Mongolian army, fleeing Hindustani tribes, who became the ancestors of
modern gypsies, migrated westwards. Among their tribes was a
caste of people skilled in the manufacture of freaks. This
caste, later to become known as the Dacianos, to which Dr Garcia
referred two centuries on, had its based in Spain but also members in
England, who apparently used to meet in an old square tower in what is
now the county of Cleveland. In Europe, the evil Dacianos
supplied the disfigured human fodder to feed an appetite for
possessing freaks which was equally as voracious as that of the Romans
ten centuries before.
An English doctor, who practiced in Chine during the 1880's, described
seeing 'animal-children' whose appearance he believed was the work of
skilled and highly technical surgery. He claimed that dealers
kidnapped small children and, literally skinned them alive, bit by
bit, replacing human flesh with pieces of hide from living dogs and
bear cubs. The grafting, which modern medical experts say would
be impossible to perform successfully, apparently took months.
Then, the poor child's vocal chords were severed and its arm and leg
joints cruelly dislocated so that it was forced to run on all fours.
Such brutal infliction of pain was not unheard of in England, where
the most popular freak for decades was the 'Human Cock' who crowed
each hour of the night. To produce a man-rooster, an operation
was performed on the larynx when he was still a child so he could make
no other sound than a strange, throaty crow. It is claimed that
'Human Cock' even became traditional, or even obligatory, at court
where they appeared at the whim of kings.
By the 19th century, it seems, the mysterious society of the Dacianos
had vanished without a trace. Its legacy, in England at least,
was a keen, morbid fascination with the human freak. This
gradually developed into an obsession which spawned the Victorian peep
show and, across the ocean in a young America, the money spinning
showmanship of Phineas T. Barnum. The monster makers had truly
left their mark. |
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