13 People with Extra Body Parts, 9-13
Completing our list of people with extra body parts, below you will find the most extreme cases -- including man with an extra body and a woman with two uteri.
10. Josephene Myrtle Corbin, born in 1868, could see Lentini his three legs and raise him one. She was a dipygus, meaning that she had two separate pelvises and four legs. As with Lentini, these were the residual parts of a conjoined twin. She could move all of the legs, but they were too weak to walk on. Like Lentini, she was a great success in sideshows with the stage name "The Four-Legged Girl from Texas." She married a doctor with whom she had five children. Legend has it that three of her children were born from one pelvis, and two from the other.
11. Born in 1932 to a poor farming family in Georgia, Betty Lou Williams was the youngest of 12 children. Doctors claimed she was a healthy child...except for the two extra arms and legs emerging from the side of her body. From the age of two, Williams worked for Ripley's Believe It Or Not and earned quite a living on the sideshow circuit--she put her siblings through college and bought her parents a large farm. She grew up to be a lovely and generous young lady, but when she was jilted by her fiance at age 23, she died from an asthma attack exacerbated by the head of the parasitic twin lodged in her abdomen.
12. Another sideshow star of the early 20th century was Jean Libbera, "The Man with Two Bodies," who was born in Rome in 1884. Libbera was born with a parasitic conjoined twin attached to his front. Photos of Libbera show a shrunken body, about 18 inches long, emerging from his abdomen with its head apparently embedded inside. He died in 1934, at age 50.
13. It might seem unusual for a woman to have two uteruses, but the condition known as uterine didelphys occurs in about one in 1,000 women. In fact, Hannah Kersey, her mother, and her sister all have two wombs. But Hannah made history in 2006 when she gave birth to triplets -- a set of identical twin girls from one womb and a third, fraternal sister from the other womb. There have been about 70 known pregnancies in separate wombs in the past 100 years, but the case of triplets is the first of its kind and doctors estimate the likelihood is about one in 25 million.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS:
Helen Davies, Marjorie Dorfman, Mary Fons, Deborah Hawkins, Martin Hintz, Linnea Lundgren, David Priess, Julia Clark Robinson, Paul Seaburn, Heidi Stevens, and Steve Theunissen
