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shyscyberchamber.com
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FREAKS
:
The Back-To-Front Man |
Date
Added
MAY 2004 |
Italian grocer Emilion Guastucci is a walking medical
marvel - and that fact once saved his life. Doctors say that
there isn't another man in ten million like him. For every organ
in his body above the hips is, simply, the wrong way round!
The 63 year old grandfather from Lucca, near Pisa, was born with his
heart on the right, his liver on the left, his spleen on the right and
so on. Internally, he is a total mirror image of what he should
scientifically speaking, look like. It's a good job he is.
For, during World War II, when the advancing German Army took over his
home town, every remaining healthy man was sent to fight in Russia or
Africa.
But when Nazi doctors witnessed Emilion's X-rays, which baffled them
completely, they were in a quandary. Should they send him to the
front line or deem him unfit for service? A senior officer
reached the decision that he had such a bizarre condition that he
could not possibly be allowed to join the fighting and ordered that he
should be sent to a hard-labour camp, close to the Austrian border.
What the invaders had not realised however, was the face that despite
his bizarre back-to-front structure - for which medical experts can
still not give nor even propose a logical reason - Emilion was, in
fact, a perfectly healthy individual.
Within weeks, he managed to escape from incarceration and, calling on
almost superhuman reserves, evaded gun patrols to walk home.
Emilion was then sheltered from retribution by friends and family and,
despite a few heart-stopping moments - felt on the right side of his
body, of course - was never recaptured. From the end of the war,
he was determined to live life to the full and making his living in
the grocery business. Even today, the customers to whom he
serves pasta, cheese and bread comment on his peculiar condition and
joke: 'Another few slices, please, from the man in ten million.'
Medically, Emilion has a condition called situs viscerum inversus,
very few other recorded cases of which are to be found around the
world. Yet he still enjoys a perfectly normal, ordinary
existence. He has two children, a son and a daughter, plus
several grandchildren, all of whom are perfectly normal. He
says: 'I don't feel any different from anyone else in Italy, even
though they first discovered that I was built back-to-front way back
in 1933, when I went for my army call-up medical.
'You should have seen the look - an expression you wouldn't believe -
on the doctor's face when he discovered that I was not standing
back-to-front, or performing some sort of stunt behind his machine.
The German specialists at first simply refused to accept my condition.
They didn't believe it was possible.
'It took a series of five more x-rays, before five different doctors
until they were finally convinced of the truth. Although I had
guessed as much, I was almost as astonished as the doctors at the
results of the x-rays. I had always thought that I might,
perhaps have been wrongly proportioned - you can't after all, miss a
heartbeat on the right instead of the left side of your body - but I
never began to realise the full extent of my back-to-frontness.
'All I can really add is that, if God chose me to be different and
created me the wrong-way-round - for some purpose I, certainly, have
never been aware, then so be it. I'm in perfectly good health,
and I've never really had a problem with illness. So, perhaps, I
can even recommend being born back-to-front!'
While Emilion Guastucci may be the original back-to-front man, the
circus world and the peep shows of old were delighted when they could
recruit those inside-out and upside-down human body tumblers who were
expert contortionists and, to give them the medical name in which the
Victorians delighted, dislocationists.
Towards the end of the last century, one of the most popular of these
characters was the Englishman Wentworth, who, while still performing
in his seventies, claimed the title of the world's oldest-ever
contortionist. His most popular act was to shut himself, along
with six empty soda water bottles in a box measuring a mere 23 by 16
inches. As he curled his still agile and amazingly flexible body
round the bottles, he was packed so tightly in that the lid could be
slammed shut on the box. Wentworth even coined a special name
for his specialty act: 'Packanatomicalization'.
American contortionist Charles Warren became known as the 'Yankee
Dish-rag' because of the amazing way in which he could twist his
flexible muscles and double joints into virtually any conceivable
position. By the tender age of 8, he had joined a travelling
troupe of acrobats and strolling performers and within a few years he
had tuned his body so perfectly that he could make tiny areas of
muscle stand out like a string or perform in a variety of bizarre
ways. He was able to contract muscles in his such a way that
vital organs, at will, could be made to bulge out. He could even
control the bones of his body to such an extent that, barely moving,
he could dislocate his own hip before simply clicking it back into
place again. Without any undue effort he could contract his
chest to 34 inches and expand it to 41 inches. Warren, a strict
teetotaler who weighed in at 150 pounds, could even fool medical
experts into believing that he had broken joints or that he had
twisted or pulled muscles. He was the father of two children,
both of whom could dislocate their hips without breaking into a sweat!
A Frenchman sprang, or rather coiled and twisted, his way to fame
around 1886 in his homeland. He was known simply as Protein Man.
He could make his body so completely taut and rigid that hitting him
with a hammer had the same effect as trying to bash a concrete wall.
Even muscles which in ordinary people are involuntary, he could
exercise at will. And he had such power over his body that he
could twist himself into what were, in effect, three dimensional
caricatures of figures such as a gnarled old city alderman or a lean
and hungry young student.
A leading French scientist who made a detailed study of the Protein
Man also discovered that he could totally shut off the blood supply to
either side of his body. In other words he could give himself a
half-anaemic look by 'switching off' the supply to the left side of
his body and then, in rotation, do the same thing to the right side.
The scientist ascribed this weird phenomenon to his ability to control
his muscles perfectly.
In Washington in 1893, a man named Fitzgerald claimed his sole source
of income was from the exhibition at medical colleges around America.
He could simulate ever conceivable bone dislocation and became a
walking encyclopedia on the science of pathology. He even
claimed to be able to display varying degrees of dislocation which
might occur in patients depending what kind of accident had befallen
them. |
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