Another Phantom article. 

Thank you-- that was very enjoyable reading. :) I must ask, where do you find these things? I can only ever find musical-verse articles.

Random stumbling around the interweb. I do a lot of really strange Phantom searches in order to find research/interesting opinions. I think when I stumbled onto this one I was cross referencing Erik and Joseph Merrick to begin with, and then it turned into a game of follow the links and google variations on the various theories of what disease might have caused Erik's deformity. The two causes I've found most likely have been embriotic bands (though I don't think that's the proper name for them) and hereditary syphilis. But there are some really interesting theories and some really messed up ones floating around.