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The "cabinets of curiosity" of the 16th and 17th centuries housed the extraordinary souvenirs that European missionaries and other travellers brought back from the New World and the East. Stuffed birds with brilliantly coloured plumage sat alongside seashells larger than the human body and mummies plucked from Africa's desert sands. But, as French surgeon Pierre Dionis discovered, sometimes the marvels in your own backyard are the strangest of all. When Dionis stumbled across a leathery fetus-like object in a priest's collection, he resolved to learn the truth about it. Could it really be that this misshapen object was the product of a 23-year-long pregnancy?

IN 1678, Pierre Dionis, surgeon in the court of Queen Maria Theresa, accompanied his illustrious patient on a pilgrimage to Pont à Mousson, a small hamlet in north-east France. There, the royal entourage was greeted by the village priest, Father Babilart, a man with a reputation for collecting strange trinkets from around the globe. Babilart was eager to show off his playthings and after ducking skeletons that dangled from the ceiling and side-stepping columns pillaged from Roman ruins, he emerged with a prize he was sure would please both the queen and her companion.

The priest lifted a large jar filled with distilled spirits into the air. Floating inside was a leathery ball-shaped object. Intrigued, the queen and Dionis moved in closer to get a better look. The ball, they now saw, was a horrifically deformed fetus. "Its arms, legs, and spine were so crumpled up together it was impossible to stretch them," Dionis wrote. "Its face was hideous, and was ruddy reddish brown in colour." The priest explained proudly that the child had been cut from its mother's belly after her death - and 23 years after she learned she was pregnant.

The queen left Dionis to investigate the priest's claims. Maria Theresa's fascination for anatomy was well known. Her husband, Louis XIV, kept a menagerie of exotic animals, and whenever one died she summoned the surgeon to dissect it. "The Queen did not have the same repugnance that other women have for anatomical demonstration," Dionis later explained in his influential Dissertation on the Generation of Man in 1698.

The queen's surgeon was no stranger to medical mysteries. At Versailles, he often performed autopsies to determine the cause of death when noblemen succumbed to illness, accident or foul play. Nor was he a stranger to "generation", as reproduction and childbirth were called at the time. The king had appointed Dionis to teach anatomy in the royal gardens, and there he had dissected pregnant women whose corpses had been cut from the gallows or, in the case of courtly women, offered for study by the royal family.

Dionis questioned Babilart at length, but the normally effusive man "could not - or did not want - to tell me more". Undeterred, Dionis pressed on. Decades-long pregnancies were not unheard of in the Renaissance and the stories continued into the 17th century. In fact, such tales of interminable childbearing were regularly told and retold in this era before caesarean section and ultrasound.

Tales of interminable pregnancies were regularly told and retold

Dionis was familiar with the story of the famous "Fetus of Sens". In 1582, 68-year-old Colombe Chatri had died following 28 years of pregnancy. When doctors dissected her body, they found a monstrous, stone-like child - a girl, as it turned out. A more recent case had surfaced in 1678 in Toulouse, where 64-year-old Marguerite Mathieu had died with a 25-year-old fetus still in her womb.

The biological explanation behind these earlier cases had not been determined with any certainty, but Dionis paid no heed to the old wives' tales that blamed magic and witchcraft. Although witch trials were on the wane in Europe by this time, expectant mothers were still warned about midwives who dabbled in the dark arts. Privy to knowledge that could help - or hinder - childbirth, midwives were both necessary and feared. In the Mathieu case, the general belief was that the mother had turned down a midwife's services. In return, the angry midwife cast a spell on the child.

Dionis steeled himself for such explanations as he set off to interview the villagers. Instead, what he heard was surprisingly to the point. The mother of the fetus in question had indeed been pregnant for 23 years, after producing several other children without incident. She had died from illness, not from the pregnancy. After her death in 1674, surgeons had been called in to perform an autopsy. They discovered the fetus that was now in Father Babilart's safe-keeping.

The surgeon reviewed what he knew about reproductive anatomy and physiology. The two great medical philosophers of antiquity, Hippocrates and Galen, had held that conception was the result of a propitious mixing of male and female "seeds" during intercourse. The invention of the microscope had led to the discovery of human eggs in 1672, and of spermatozoa five years later. This meant that centuries-old theories on reproduction needed to be rewritten.

“ Tales of interminable pregnancies were regularly told and retold”

Two schools of thought quickly emerged: reproduction was deemed the sole responsibility of either the female egg or the male sperm - but not both. "Ovists" held that all of humanity lay preformed in women's eggs, nestled one inside the other like Russian dolls; "animaculists" argued that preformed little men lay in wait, each in the head of a sperm. For nearly a century, theories that humans were preformed in either the egg or sperm dominated embryological theory. It was not until the 1780s that early ideas about what we might now recognise as epigenesis would begin to take hold in medicine.

Dionis was an ovist but was nevertheless appalled by suggestions that sexual intercourse might not be necessary for conception. In the south of France, an "absurd rumour" had been circulating about a young man who became pregnant after failing to ejaculate during sex. A few hours later, the man felt excruciating pain in one of his testicles. Over the next eight or nine months, the testicle had swollen to the size of a turkey's egg and required amputation. Inside the testicular mass, doctors found "a bony globe that had two orbits with two small black pouches, which were full of water". While some claimed it was possible that the man had impregnated himself, Dionis held firm in his conclusion that this testicular "pregnancy" was simply a cancerous mass.

Determined to solve the mystery of the 23-year-old fetus, Dionis returned to Babilart's cabinet of curiosity and pressed the priest for more information. Babilart reluctantly offered his own explanation for the interminable pregnancy. The woman had been pregnant not for 23 years but for her entire life, he said. An egg had lodged in her abdomen while she was still in her own mother's womb. The fetus was not her child, but rather, her twin.

Dionis dismissed the priest's speculations: in his opinion the man was as deluded as those who spoke about testicular pregnancies. The surgeon explained to Babilart with growing impatience that "seminal vapour" released during the sex act had moved up through the woman's uterus and into the fallopian tubes. The seminal vapour had caused the preformed, miniature fetus in one of the tubes to expand and grow. But instead of travelling along the tube and into the uterus, where it would develop over the term of the pregnancy, the fetus "dropped into the stomach", where it had remained until the mother's death. The priest "refused to yield to my reason", Dionis later wrote. "So I decided to leave him alone in his stubbornness."

Ignoring his preformationist leanings, Dionis's theory follows the general lines of what we would now recognise as an ectopic or abdominal pregnancy. But was the priest necessarily wrong? His explanation is suggestive of fetus in fetu (fetus within in a fetus), sometimes known as a "parasitic twin". First recognised in the 19th century, this is a rare condition in which a calcified, fetus-like mass lodges in the body of another while both are in the womb. Perhaps the old priest's claim was not so improbable after all.

Holly Tucker

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