Historical Figure Dubbed 'Elephant Man' For His Long Nose

Nov 21, 2022 by apost team

Have you always wondered who the person with the longest nose in history was? Well, maybe you did at one point in your life, too. In November 2022, an image of a man with a long nose circulated on the internet. And while it may seem like it’s an edited photo, we’re here to tell you it isn’t. Well, it’s a wax figure. The truth is, it’s a wax figure. But the person behind it indeed existed in the past. But who exactly is the man in the photo?

The titleholder of the World’s Longest Recorded Nose on a Living Person is a 73-year-old Turkish man named Mehmet Özyürek. His nose measured 8.8 cm (3.55 inches).

Özyürek claimed he had a better sense of smell compared to other people.

"For example, I enter my house… I can immediately tell which dish is cooked,” he told Guinness World Records in 2021. Özyürek can even inflate a balloon using his nose.

But you may have probably come across a man with the longest nose on social media. Thanks to a Twitter account called Historic Vids that shared a photo of the man’s wax figure found at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum, there had been a renewed interest in the person behind the wax reproduction. Well, the man is Thomas Wedders.

The photo Historic Vids shared alone went viral and amassed more than 120,000 likes on Twitter in less than a week.

Now, let’s get to know Wedders more.

Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1730, Thomas Wedders or also known as Thomas Wadhouse, the Guinness World Records posthumously recognized him as the person with the World’s Largest Nose. Yes, it allegedly measured 7.5 inches (19 cm) long.

Then again, it wasn’t really clear what the cause of his facial deformity was. He made a living out of entertaining people and performed at various circus sideshows in the mid-18th century.

Wedders' exact age when he died has yet to be determined, but people claimed he passed away at either the age of 50 or 52. It’s also unclear what year he died, but people believed it was around 1780 in Yorkshire.

There is also no available information on the cause of his death.

A Reddit thread had people describing Wedders as an elephant man. But, of course, there were people who were skeptical about the actual size of Wedders' nose. “Did he self-report at 7.5 inches? If so, we all know it was really 6 inches at best,” one user wrote. “Pff how are they measuring, from base to tip?” another user wrote.

The Strand Magazine published a story about Wedders in 1896, with an illustration depicting his nose. “Thus, if noses were ever uniformly exact in representing the importance of the individual, this worthy ought to have amassed all the money in Threadneedle Street and conquered all Europe,” part of the Strand Magazine story read.

"But either his chin was too weak or his brow too low, or Nature had so exhausted herself in the task of giving this prodigy a nose as to altogether forget to endow him with brains; or perhaps, the nose crowded out this latter commodity.”

"At all events, we are told this Yorkshireman expired, nose and all, as he had lived, in a condition of mind best described as idiocy the most abject.”

While he lived to make people laugh, they also called him “idiot” because he was allegedly intellectually disabled. Heartbreaking, indeed.

apost.com

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