The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences

by Frederick Treves

The withdrawal of all newspapers was evidently a punishment devised by a man. It was no punishment to me nor would it be to the average woman. The nurse, of course, kept me informed of current events as she was extremely fond of talking and thereby rendered a newspaper unnecessary. She told me of the occasions when my husband called to inquire and always said that he looked very well and remarkably cheerful. She walked past my house once and came back with the information that the drawing-room blinds were up and that the sun was streaming into the room. This worried me a great deal as I don’t like faded carpets and silks and am very fond of my furniture.

After I had been in the home a few days I discovered that the institution was not wholly devoted to rest-cure cases, but that it was also a surgical home where many operations were performed. This frightened me terribly because I began to wonder whether an operation had been an item of the programme when I was taken seriously in hand. I arrived at the conclusion that I was being “prepared for operation,” that I was being “built up,” with the result that I was prostrated by alarm. I felt that at any moment a man with a black bag might enter the room and proceed to chloroform me. There came upon me a conviction that I was being imprisoned, that I had been duped and trapped. Above all was the awful feeling, which nearly suffocated me, that I was powerless to escape. I thought my husband had been most base to desert me like this and hand me over, as it were, to unknown executioners.

I have a dread of operations which is beyond expression. The mere thinking of the process of being chloroformed makes me sick and faint. You are held down on a table, I believe, and then deliberately suffocated. It must be as if a man knelt upon your chest and strangled you by gripping your throat with his hands. When I was a small girl I saw a cook dispose of a live mouse by sinking the mouse-trap in which it was imprisoned in a bucket of water. I remember that the struggles of the mouse, as seen under water, were horrible to witness. When I grew up and was told about people being chloroformed for operation I always imagined that their feelings would be as hideous as those of the drowning mouse in a trap.

I told all my suspicions and alarms to the nurse, who laughed at me contemptuously. She said: “You are merely a nerve case.” (“Merely,” thought I.) “No surgeon ever thinks of operating on a nerve case. The greater number of the patients here come for very serious operations. They are real patients.” As she conversed further I must confess that my pride began to be touched. I had supposed that my case was the most important and most interesting in the establishment. I had the largest room in the house while the fussing over me had been considerable. I now began to learn that there were others who were in worse plight than myself. I, on the one hand, had merely to lie in bed and sleep. They, on the other, came to the home with their lives in their hands to confront an appalling ordeal. I was haunted by indefinite alarms; they had to submit to the tangible steel of the surgeon’s knife. I began to be a little ashamed of myself and of the trouble I had occasioned. Compared with me these women were heroines. They had something to fuss about, for they had to walk alone into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I had many times said that I wished I was dead, but a little reflection on the modes of dying made me keep that wish ever after unexpressed.

My nurse deplored that she was not a surgical nurse. “To nurse an operation case is real nursing,” she said. “There is something satisfactory in work like that. I am only a mental nurse, you see”—a confession which humbled me still further.

It was in September that I entered the home, and as the leading surgeons were still out of London there were no operations. When October came the gruesome work was resumed. The house was set vibrating with excitement. In this I shared as soon as I discovered that the operating theatre was immediately over my bedroom. Almost the first operation happened to be a particularly momentous one, concerned with which was none other than the great surgeon of the day. His coming was anticipated with a buzz of interest by the nurses, an interest which was even shared by the mental nurse in whose charge I was.

I could learn very little about this great case save that it was desperate and the victim a woman. I know that she entered the home the night before, for my nurse planned to meet her on her way to her room. I know also that just before the hour of closing the house I heard sobbing on the staircase as two people slowly made their way down. I came to know afterwards that one was the husband, the other the daughter.

The operation was to be at nine in the morning. By 6 A.M. the whole house was astir. There was much running up and down stairs. Everybody was occupied. My morning toilet and breakfast were hurried through with little ceremony. The nurse was excited, absent-minded and disinclined to answer questions. After my breakfast was cleared away she vanished—it was supposed that I was never to be left alone—and did not appear again until noon. When she did come back she found me an altered woman.

I lay in bed in the solitary room with my eyes fixed upon the white ceiling over my head. I was terrified beyond all reason. There was everywhere the sense of an overstrung activity, hushed and ominous, which was leading on to tragedy. I knew that in the room above me was about to be enacted a drama in which one of the actors was Death.

There was considerable bustle in the room in question. They were moving something very heavy into the middle of the floor. It was, I am sure, the operation table. Other tables were dragged about and adjusted with precision. Above the ceaseless patter of feet I could hear the pouring of water into basins.