The four-legged woman with two wombs

When Josephine Myrtle Corbin was born in Lincoln County, Tennessee, in 1868, it must have come as a shock to her parents. What she was born as the only daughter of her newborn of her, nature intended to become two twin girls. Instead, the two separate children had merged into one four-legged girl with two pelvises. She was called a dipygus, that is, a human being with two complete bodies from the waist down. Only two of the four legs were under her control to walk, but she could move both sets. Unfortunately, one of her walking legs was malformed with a clubfoot. Even with all those legs walking was difficult for her.

At the age of 19, she married a doctor and had four daughters and a son. Some say that a couple of her children were born from the smaller “sister” pelvis, but these may be understandable rumours. If, on the other hand, they are true, then she also gave birth to her twin sister’s children not born to her, as they arose from the ovary and uterus of her pelvis. Whatever the truth in every way, the children were healthy and normal. Josephine Myrtle, on the other hand, was neither, but she did understand how to make a living from that fact by becoming a circus “freak,” making good money from the people who watched her.

Regarding the rumors: When Josephine Myrtle was informed by her doctor that she was pregnant, she was surprised that it happened, and that the child was situated in “that pelvis.” It seems the other one was the one normally used for sex, so maybe the rumors were pretty spot on after all. If that’s the case, then some of the lovely children, posing with Myrtle and her husband in the photos, may in fact not be theirs, but nieces or nephews, born from the sister’s surplus pelvis. However, the truth will never be known as Josephine Myrtle Corbin died on May 6, 1928.

The birthing sister pelvis perspective is that children who come from a dead, unborn, or simply not living pelvis are the offspring of a non-existent woman who didn’t even breathe, but still “had a life” and spread her genes when becoming a mother. The thought is at once a prolonged, nauseating, and deeply disturbing thought. That part of the Josephine Myrtle myth reminds me of women in a coma with almost no brain activity who end up giving birth, for example, after a hospital rape.