This invisible riot of the mind: Samuel Johnson's psychological theory

modern illustrations. The result is a somewhat undernourishing pamphlet which, so far as I could judge, tells us nothing new about Mr Merrick except that he had bad teeth. Graham and Oehlschlaeger embark on an altogether more exciting project, not a study of the Elephant Man but of "articulations" of him. They are interested in how myths about the Elephant Man have been manufactured, and in why it is that we should be tempted to invent Joseph Merrick had he not actually lived. Indeed, they show that the Elephant Man has been invented and reinvented over the past century-by doctors, showmen, journalists and readers, and more recently (and memorably) by the playwright Bernard Pomerance and the film-maker David Lynch. These constructions are carefully described and analysed and the result is to present a narrative of affecting, terrible enchantment. We are presented, in fact, with a series of intertwining stories which collectively form a myth. In descending order of specificity, these stories tell of the pitiable freak rescued by the arm of benevolence (the surgeon Frederick Treves), a patient and pious creature forced to survive in a hostile world, the unsullied mind trapped in a hideous, corrupted body, and of how society-all of us-confront the Other (who may, of course, lie hidden within ourselves). Both Robert Wadlow and Joseph Merrick were described as "real gentlemen", as kind and intelligent, and both sought (in vain) to lead unfreakish lives. Neither lived into maturity and neither seems to have formed any intimate relationships. The outstanding difference is that while Wadlow mounted a campaign to protect himself from the intrusive attentions of medicine and the media, Merrick knew that his only hope of survival was to commit himself to the care of the London Hospital, where he lived after his rescue by Treves. It is difficult to imagine poets and playwrights being drawn to Wadlow as they have to Merrick, for Wadlow refused to submit to the authority of those that told him what he was (a monster) and what he could not be (normal); so far from relishing the help extended to him by the medical profession, he fought it doggedly. Merrick was on the whole a more passive and accommodating patient: he offers the opportunity of a warming counterposition between the hideous, hopeless case and the miracles of modern medicine. Tales about the Elephant Man are able to transmute horror into kindness. While medical historians will find much to enjoy in Articulating the Elephant Man, many will regret the paucity in the book of medical or intellectual context. A complete study of Joseph Merrick-man and myth-is inconceivable without some understanding of Victorian teratology and theories of degeneration, of the development of the medical profession (which, after all, sequestered the Elephant Man) and, not least, of the theory of maternal impressions. In folk belief, freaks were thought to be born of mothers whose foetuses were "impressed" by a powerful image which the weak, feminine brain was incapable of containing. The hostility accorded to Merrick's mother by many (including Treves), which puzzles Graham and Oehlschlaeger may well be part and parcel of the blame meted out to women who gave birth to defective babies.