The prodigious Julia Pastrana was known by many monikers during her life and perhaps just as many names in death. Both her life and her death are rather sad tales, but they hold a very special place in sideshow history because, for a time, she was not considered a member of the human race.
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Believe it or not, human corpulence was once an admired trait. Today, obesity is often looked at in disgust but, in the golden era of sideshow and in the 18th century – the Fat Man or Woman was a mainstay in the business of prodigious display. For some reason, persons of the time loved to [...]
Bill Durks understandably had a tough childhood. He was born in Jasper, Alabama on April 13, 1913 with a condition known today as frontonasal dysplasia. During gestation, the two halves of Bill’s face failed to come together completely and uniformly and as a result he was born with deep cleft lip, open palate and a [...]
Piebald is a word often used to describe animals with large black and white spots, however in the golden age of sideshow – and even long before that - it was used to describe human beings with this unusual skin condition.
Contrary to what one may assume, piebalding is not related to albinism and is instead [...]
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century must have been a simply enchanting time as fairy-tales seemed to spring into reality and the shelves of cabinets of curiosities overflowed with unusual items. The old stories of wee folk, giants and misshapen monsters seemed to be confirmed reality and in 1556 it seemed as though werewolves were also a [...]
In 1790 the astute surgeon Everard Home wrote of ‘a species of lusus naturae so unaccountable, that, I believe, no similar instance is to be found upon record’. He was writing of the Boy of Bengal after observing drawings and collecting and reviewing the accounts of several of his peers. While the boy was remarkable [...]
While there is scarce material on Blanche Dumas, her alleged lover Juan Baptista dos Santos was the subject of some fairly intense study.
Juan Baptista dos Santos was born in Portugal around 1843 in the town of Faro and was examined for the first time when he was only six months old. His parents and two [...]
The strange story of Blanche Dumas is truly stranger than fiction.
It is believed that Blanche Dumas was born on the island of Martinique in 1860 to a French father and a mother was a quadroon (one quarter black). At the age of 25 Blanche was visited and documented by Bechlinger of [...]
Ambrose Paré wrote in 1530 of a forty year old man with a headless parasitic body hanging ‘like a pendulum’ from his belly. He also wrote of a German man, ‘born the same year that peace was made with the Swiss and King Francis’ who had a parasitic head protruding from his abdomen. These accounts [...]
J. Tithonus Pednaud herein presents for your edification and enlightenment a curious collection of human marvels. These portent and exceptionally unique human beings stand as uplifting testaments to human spirit and serve as inspiring examples of human tenacity.
