Anomalies and Curiosities of MedicineGould, George M. (George Milbrey)
Science
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine
Gould, George M. (George Milbrey)
Abnormalities, Human; Medicine -- Anecdotes
Bartholinus has observed a Danish woman with three mammae, two
ordinarily formed and a third forming a triangle with the others and
resembling the breasts of a fat man. In the village of Phullendorf in
Germany early in this century there was an old woman who sought alms
from place to place, exhibiting to the curious four symmetrical
breasts, arranged parallel. She was extremely ugly, and when on all
fours, with her breasts pendulous, she resembled a beast. The authors
have seen a man with six distinct nipples, arranged as regularly as
those of a bitch or sow. The two lower were quite small. This man's
body was covered with heavy, long hair, making him a very conspicuous
object when seen naked during bathing. The hair was absent for a space
of nearly an inch about the nipples. Borellus speaks of a woman with
three mammae, two as ordinarily, the third to the left side, which gave
milk, but not the same quantity as the others. Gardiner describes a
mulatto woman who had four mammae, two of which were near the axillae,
about four inches in circumference, with proportionate sized nipples.
She became a mother at fourteen, and gave milk from all her breasts. In
his "Dictionnaire Philosophique" Voltaire gives the history of a woman
with four well-formed and symmetrically arranged breasts; she also
exhibited an excrescence, covered with a nap-like hair, looking like a
cow-tail. Percy thought the excrescence a prolongation of the coccyx,
and said that similar instances were seen in savage men of Borneo.
Percy says that among some prisoners taken in Austria was found a woman
of Valachia, near Roumania, exceedingly fatigued, and suffering
intensely from the cold. It was January, and the ground was covered
with three feet of snow. She had been exposed with her two infants, who
had been born twenty days, to this freezing temperature, and died on
the next day. An examination of her body revealed five mammae, of which
four projected as ordinarily, while the fifth was about the size of
that of a girl at puberty.
They all had an intense dark ring about them; the fifth was situated
about five inches above the umbilicus. Percy injected the subject and
dissected and described the mammary blood-supply. Hirst mentions a
negress of nineteen who had nine mammae, all told, and as many nipples.
The two normal glands were very large. Two accessory glands and
nipples below them were small and did not excrete milk. All the other
glands and nipples gave milk in large quantities. There were five
nipples on the left and four on the right side. The patient's mother
had an accessory mamma on the abdomen that secreted milk during the
period of lactation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account