Most people know the broad strokes of Joseph Merrick's life. A severely deformed man in Victorian London, exhibited in a freak show, rescued by a kindly surgeon, given a home at a hospital until his death at 27. What most retellings skip is that the actual medical question at the centre of his story, what was actually wrong with him, still doesn't have a confirmed answer, more than a century of theories, DNA tests and one very famous misdiagnosis later. The story of trying to solve that question