In the 17th century the French physician Patin described the case of a local woman who had ‘turned to wood’. This ‘wood’ was actually bone and the woman possessed an incredibly rare condition that caused her muscles to be slowly turned to bone. Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva or FOP, as the condition is know by today,…
Persons with unusual skin conditions often used their affliction to their financial advantage in the world of the sideshow. The alligator-skinned (sometimes called elephant-skinned) individual became a very common attraction in the golden age of sideshow – in fact few popular sideshows were without at least one such individual. Not to be confused with the…
Perhaps most well know under the name ‘The French Angel’, Maurice Tillet was born in 1903 in the Ural Mountains in Russia to French parents. and he was born a completely average and healthy child. He aspired to become an actor and was highly intelligent, allegedly speaking 14 languages and being quite gifted in prose. However,…
The trait of polydactyl (also known as supernumerary fingers) is an inherited trait and these occurrences have been carefully documented for centuries. Some extreme cases include: an instance of 13 fingers on each hand and 12 toes on each foot, an infant at the Htel-Dieu in Paris in 1687 which had 40 digits, ten on…
The man in the video is Dutch Fakir Mirin Dajo. He was born in 1912 as Arnold Gerrit Henskes and adopted his name, an Esperanto term that translates to mean ‘wonderful’. In 1947, at the Corso Theatre in Zurich, Mirin Dajo allow an assistant to plunge a fencing foil right through his body. The foil…