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  • 2021-06-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Is This Josephine Myrtle Corbin, 'The 4-Legged Girl'? (en)
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  • On June 28, 2021, a photograph supposedly showing Josephine Myrtle Corbin, a woman who was born in the 1860s as a Dipygus — a severe congenital deformity that results in having two pelvises and four legs — was circulated on social media: While Corbin was a real person who truly had four legs, this 1860s circus performer is not featured in the above-displayed picture. This image has been altered and was originally created for a hoax in the tabloid Weekly World News (WWN). If you're not familiar, WWN was an infamous supermarket tabloid that frequently published far-fetched fictional tales involving time-travelers, the half-bat, half-human Bat Boy, Adolf Hitler's escape from Berlin via UFO, Hillary Clinton's alien baby, and the above-displayed four-legged woman, whom WWN named Ashley Braistle. Braistle's fictional saga started circa 1994 when WWN published an article claiming that a four-legged woman, then named Ashley B., was looking for love. Ashley says in this piece: I want people to love me for who I am, not how many legs I have. The Ashley saga continued in the pages of WWN until 1996 when the tabloid killed her off in a skiing accident. It's this 1996 issue that featured the viral photograph that would later be miscaptioned as depicting Josephine Myrtle Corbin. It appears that WWN ultimately came to regret the decision to kill off this four-legged woman, because in 2001 they published a where are they now story explaining Ashley never actually died and that her husband is still a leg man. The story of Ashley Braistle is a work of fiction and these images don't actually show a four-legged woman. There was, however, a real woman who was born with four legs in the 1860s. Josephine Myrtle Corbin was born in Tennessee in 1868 with four legs. In 1888, Dr. Joseph Jones described Corbin (misspelled below as Corban) in a report entitled Contribution to Teratology, writing: Corbin's four legs drew the attention of the medical community, and eventually the public at large. By the 1880s she was touring as a circus performer. Here are two newspaper advertisements promoting the four-legged girl that were published in 1885 in Minnesota's St. Paul Globe (left) and the Boston Globe (right): Wikipedia has a few photographs of Corbin that appear to be genuine but have indeterminate sources. The one genuine photograph that we could find comes from the University of Texas and shows Corbin at the approximate age of 19 in 1877: (en)
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