Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain

In 2016, actor and campaigner Adam Pearson presented a documentary called Adam Pearson: Freak Show.

The project was a look at how the age-old concept of freak shows, where differently abled folks were paraded in front of a gawking audience, wasn’t as dead as it seemed. What’s more, the people who were exhibited in these shows were happy with the opportunities that came from performing. One wonders what Blanche Dumas would have thought of this development.

After all, Dumas wasn’t lucky enough to be born at a time when freak shows could be run by the acts themselves. Instead, it’s been reported that she was born in 1860 (there’s reason to doubt the veracity of these reports, but we’ll get to them later), and she was born with a dipygus twin. Now, this is a condition where, in the womb, an egg is fertilised in a way that should develop into twins. However, in some very, very rare cases, one twin stops developing along the way.

That’s how you get people like Blanche Dumas, where her body essentially duplicated below the waist. This left her with two fully grown and fully usable legs, a third one growing out of her hips and, yes, between them, two fully functioning sets of genitalia. Directly above her waist was also, reportedly, a second set of breasts. However, there’s reason to believe that these were growths from additional appendages that were amputated when Blanche was a child.

You might wonder why someone might refer to them as breasts in that case, when there’s reason to believe they might not be, which is where things get a little murky. Not only in terms of what about her history we can truly trust, but also the morals involved in it. You see, what was published about Dumas was probably not anything real, but a backstory given to her due to her history in said freak show circuit.

The same circuit that said she gave up her spot in the show to become a “renowned courtesan” in Paris.

So, who was Blanche Dumas?

We might not know all that much about Dumas’ life, but, strangely enough, we know quite a bit about her condition.

We know that she was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, and during her upbringing, she was spotted by Dr George M Gould and Dr Walter L Pyle. They were working on a book titled Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine and asked if she could be featured in their book. She said yes, and thus, Gould and Pyle wrote extensively about her condition.

They said that Dumas had “a very broad pelvis, two imperfectly developed legs, and a supernumerary limb attached to the symphysis, without a joint, but with slight passive movement”.

As far as her internal organs, she had “a duplication of bowel, bladder, and genitalia” along with “two rudimentary mammary glands, each containing a nipple“. Strangely, Gould and Pyle said that they’d found another woman with “Possibly the same” condition as Dumas on the island, which, considering the population was just over 150,000 at the time, sounds unlikely.

However, it’s also likely that Dumas didn’t really want people to know what they had written about here, because this was specifically about her genitalia. More specifically, they said, “There were two vaginae and two well-developed vulvae, both having equally developed sensations. The sexual appetite was markedly developed, and coitus was practised in both vaginae.” Which one might not want being shouted about in a book that hundreds of thousands of people would buy in 1896, right?

Perhaps Pearson was right, and we have moved on from the (in)glory days of freak show culture. As the treatment of Blanche Dumas shows, it would be difficult not to.