Anyone familiar with Joni Mitchell's beautiful poem about fame, ”The Fishbowl,” might find it contains a rather apt parallel to the life of Thomas Wedders. For those unaware, the poem presents the profound metaphor of fame as a glimmering goldfish behind glass. When all the 'ordinary' fish from the crowd comes close to gaze at the goldfish, their breath clouds the glass, and the beauty of the goldfish is lost forever.
Believe it or not, Thomas Wedders, a circus worker in 18th-century England, had a 7.5-inch-long nose! #100BIONS pic.twitter.com/4CiONAhRuY
— Ripley's Believe It or Not! (@Ripleys) April 8, 2019
Similarly, Thomas Wedders' holds a similar tragic fatalism to it. Wandering around working-class Yorkshire in the early 18th century with a 7.5 inch nose, Wedders stuck out like a sore thumb (per the book ''Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine” by George Gould and Walter Pyle). Naturally, it was just a matter of time before Wedders' unique feature piqued the curiosity of the wider community — not to mention that there were probably plenty of physicians and medical researchers who would be too keen to turn Wedders into a walking, talking case study.
Although records of his life are few and far between, Wedders is mentioned in "The Strand Magazine Vol XI," published more than a century later in 1896. In this short feature, Wedder is cruelly mocked by implying that Wedders' had below-average intelligence. Here is just one malicious choice excerpt: ”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.”
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