Hairy women

A pretty and plump, thirty-six-year-old German woman from Baden-Baden was in every way a perfect and promising woman, but she had a brown rounded beard which was incredibly long and looked like a broom. She came from a hairy family: her father had hair on his nose and the whole of his face, but it was short like that of a dachshund.

Her mother was covered in long, straight hairs, and naked she looked as though she was wearing a shirt. Both parents were born in the same town close to the Baltic Sea, where everyone is even hairier, and the hairs form a hirsute mantle so thick that it is difficult to believe they are human beings. In old age, they become white and resemble polar bears, with the one difference that they are bald in the manner of the rest of us, i.e. only at the top of the head. However, the bald patch has a shiny yellow appearance, like something that has had its lid removed.

This is a not infrequent of endemic hypertrichosis. The Mexican, Julia Pastrana was also covered with a thicket of long, wiry hair. She died in Europe in 1860 after having given birth to a boy with jet black hair on his body and the suggestion of a tail, who would not marry. There was however an amiable and graceful English lady of Greenwich, who at about twenty years of age had a very fine beard of golden locks, four or five centimetres long. She stroked it slowly and softly, like caressing a lover, and she smiled with passive pleasure on feeling a woman’s soft hand on her face. It appears that in the intimacy of her own thoughts, she was rather pleased with that lovely ornament.

A fourth observable case is that of a fifty-year-old gentlewoman of Orvieto. Her family were unaware of the beard, as she shaved herself every morning until there wasn’t the slightest sign of a single hair. When she became ill and had to stay in bed for several months, the beard, which had been cut for so many years, grew with such vigour that the general practitioner who came to examine her, thought he was in the presence of a capuchin monk.