Anomalies and Curiosities of MedicineGould, George M. (George Milbrey)
Science
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine
Gould, George M. (George Milbrey)
Abnormalities, Human; Medicine -- Anecdotes
Cases in which there is a repetition of multiple births are quite
numerous, and sometimes so often repeated as to produce a family the
size of which is almost incredible. Aristotle is credited with saying
that he knew the history of a woman who had quintuplets four times.
Pliny's case of quintuplets four times repeated has been mentioned; and
Pare, who may be believed when he quotes from his own experience, says
that the wife of the last Lord de Maldemeure, who lived in the Parish
of Seaux, was a marvel of prolificity. Within a year after her marriage
she gave birth to twins; in the next year to triplets; in the third
year to quadruplets; in the fourth year to quintuplets, and in the
fifth year bore sextuplets; in this last labor she died. The then
present Lord de Maldemeure, he says, was one of the final sextuplets.
This case attracted great notice at the time, as the family was quite
noble and very well known. Seaux, their home, was near Chambellay.
Picus Mirandulae gathered from the ancient Egyptian inscriptions that
the women of Egypt brought forth sometimes 8 children at a birth, and
that one woman bore 30 children in 4 confinements. He also cites, from
the history of a certain Bishop of Necomus, that a woman named Antonia,
in the Territory of Mutina, Italy, now called Modena, had brought forth
40 sons before she was forty years of age, and that she had had 3 and 4
at a birth. At the auction of the San Donato collection of pictures a
portrait of Dianora Frescobaldi, by one of the Bronzinos in the
sixteenth century, sold for about $3000. At the bottom of this portrait
was an inscription stating that she was the mother of 52 children. This
remarkable woman never had less than 3 at a birth, and tradition gives
her as many as 6.
Merriman quotes a case of a woman, a shopkeeper named Blunet, who had
21 children in 7 successive births. They were all born alive, and 12
still survived and were healthy. As though to settle the question as to
whom should be given the credit in this case, the father or the mother,
the father experimented upon a female servant, who, notwithstanding her
youth and delicateness, gave birth to 3 male children that lived three
weeks. According to despatches from Lafayette, Indiana, investigation
following the murder, on December 22, 1895, of Hester Curtis, an aged
woman of that city, developed the rather remarkable fact that she had
been the mother of 25 children, including 7 pairs of twins.
According to a French authority the wife of a medical man at
Fuentemajor, in Spain, forty-three years of age, was delivered of
triplets 13 times. Puech read a paper before the French Academy in
which he reports 1262 twin births in Nimes from 1790 to 1875, and
states that of the whole number in 48 cases the twins were duplicated,
and in 2 cases thrice repeated, and in one case 4 times repeated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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