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Jean Libbera

From Kook Science

Jean Libbera
Born 1884
Sources from the early 1900s give his birth place as Buenos Ayres, and describe Libbera as Brazilian; later sources, from the 1920s, give Pérfugas in the Italian province of Sassari as his birth place
Died 1936 (aged 51–52)
Italy

Jean (Giovanni) Libbera (1884-1936), the Double-Bodied Man, was a touring sideshow performer of Italian descent, famed as the autosite to his epigastric parasitic twin Jacques Libbera (1884-1936).

The Twins

Per the British Medical Journal (29 Jun. 1912, p. 1499), summarising van Duyse:[D]

"The parasite (named Jacques) was, as is usual, rudimentary, and was attached to Jean (the autosite) by the neck, which was embedded in the supra-umbilical tissues of the latter; it consisted of a short trunk without an umbilicus and with no vertebrae, from which sprung two upper limbs joined together at their upper ends and without shoulders, and two lower limbs, markedly flexed and with large feet; the pelvic extremity of the parasite was large and covered with hair, but it had no anus and no intergluteal groove; there was a large scrotum, with one testicle, and a penis with a meatus from which urine escaped drop by drop to a daily amount of from 30 to 50 grams. There was no heart, and the parasite, therefore, probably received its blood from the internal mammary or from the epigrastric artery of the autosite. The limbs were only capable of passive movements, and Dr. Van Duyse concluded that their musculature was absent. When the skin of the parasite was pinched, Jean (the autosite) was conscious of it and could indicate the exact spot. An x ray photograph showed that the heads of the humeri were lost in a conical mass of bone which may have been part of the neck of the scapula, and that there was a bony pelvis open in the front. There was a mass of bone which probably represented the scapula, and this lay in the near neighbourhood of the ensiform cartilage of the autosite. This double individual (Jean and Jacques) is to be classified as an example of ventral super-umbilical asymmetrical duplicity, the parasite being a hemi-acardius; more briefly it may be named an epigastrius parasiticus."

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