In order to more fully mock my wife’s horrible allergic reactions to bug bites, I spent some time today reading up on Joseph Merrick (a.k.a. “The Elephant Man”) at Wikipedia.
The entry has all the basic information, but includes some details that literally could not be made up. In particular:
He received care from this place until his death, a result of sleeping horizontally, which caused the weight of his face to suffocate himself. It was believed to be accidental, an attempt by Merrick to imitate normal behavior. Prior to the incident he had slept upright.
I don’t know whether that strikes me more as an incredible tragedy (an apparently sensitive and intelligent man, who had already endured a life as a freak dying in a vain attempt to be more normal), or as something that I should be laughing at with morgue humour.
Either way, it’s the kind of detail that the real world puts out there every now and then to make fiction look too simple.
