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One of the more interesting historical nuggets to cross our transom in recent years is the claim that a certain English gentleman of the nineteenth century named Edward Mordrake (or Edward Mordake, according to older sources) was born with a bizarre medical condition so troubling that it drove him to suicide: Albeit popularized in the 2000s via memes, songs, and TV shows, the Edward Mordrake story isn't of recent origin, having aroused the morbid interests of Victorian readers more than a century ago in Gould and Pyle's Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, first published in 1896. This is how the authors of that hefty volume recounted it: Despite the credulous reception the story has frequently received, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. For one, the entire passage about Edward Mordrake was quoted from what the authors describe as lay sources (more about which later), which sets it apart from other entries (such as their account of the life of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man) drawn from actual medical case histories. For another, it is heavy on melodrama (e.g., he was kept from his rest at night by the hateful whispers of his ‘devil twin,’ as he called it), while giving only the slightest nod to science (apart from applying the now-antiquated medical classification bicephalic monsters, there is really no scientific verbiage at all). And although it purports to cite two attending physicians, Manvers and Treadwell, a critique of the entry in the 1906 edition of The Theosophical Review reported that the names appeared nowhere in the Dict. of National Biography (a Victorian-era Who's Who). The origin of the black-and-white photograph purporting to show Edward Mordrake and his devil twin in profile (which has appeared in Internet postings since 2007) is unknown. Despite its vintage appearance, the image exhibits greater resolution and clarity than what is typically seen in photographic reproductions of the mid-to-late Victorian era (e.g., the 1889 photograph of Joseph Merrick published in the British Medical Journal). It appears, in fact, to be a retouched photo of a wax figure in the Panoptikum Wax Museum in Hamburg, Germany. There does exist a real medical condition, Craniopagus parasiticus, whose symptoms bear a very basic resemblance to those described in this case. It's an extremely rare complication in conjoined twins wherein one of the pair is underdeveloped and less than fully functional (hence parasitic), and takes the form of a vestigial head attached to the cranium of the autositic (dominant) twin. According to a 2016 case report, there have only been ten or fewer recorded cases of Craniopagus parasiticus in history, of which only three survived past birth and were documented in the literature. Of those three, two died before the age of two, despite surgical attempts to save the life of the autositic twin. The third, known famously as the two-headed boy of Bengal, lived to be four years old and was reported to be in good health until he was bitten by a cobra and died. Most significantly, as regards the Edward Mordrake case, conjoined twins are by definition genetically identical, so they are always of the same sex. The devil twin described in that case was female, while the autositic twin was male (though it could be argued, of course, that the vestigial face was misidentified as female). That the sneering face had no audible voice comports with such information as we have on real cases of Craniopagus parasiticus, but the claims that it exhibited every sign of intelligence and taunted the poor man with hateful whispers do not. Accounts of the two-headed boy of Bengal said the vestigial face in that case could grimace and its eyes were observed moving, for example, but though there could have been some sort of rudimentary consciousness present there were no signs of intelligence. Alternatively, it has been suggested that Mordrake might have suffered instead from a congenital defect known as Diprosopus (or craniofacial duplication), in which facial features are duplicated to a greater or lesser extent on other areas of the head (in the rarest cases, the full face is duplicated). The mechanisms behind this deformity aren't fully understood, although many researchers believe it to be another rare form of conjoined twinning. Although somewhat more common than Craniopagus parasiticus (with just under 50 instances documented since the mid-nineteenth century), Diprosopus has a similarly poor survival rate, with most cases ending in stillbirth. In short, although science does offer theoretical explanations for Mordrake's condition, they are few and only marginally plausible. Gould and Pyle reported in 1896 that the well-known story of Edward Mordake they quoted was taken from lay sources — plural — despite the fact that there was really only one. Science historian Alex Boese has traced the quoted text, verbatim, to a syndicated newspaper article written in 1895 by Charles Lotin Hildreth, a poet and author of speculative fiction: What all these wonders of science had in common, Boese points out, is that no mention of them is to be found in any previous sources. None. It appears, in other words, that Hildreth simply made them up. Albeit couched as nonfiction, the article was actually a work of speculative fiction in the spirit of other scientific hoaxes of the time, such as the infamous life-on-the-moon hoax of 1835 and the Cardiff Giant hoax of 1869. Boese concludes -- convincingly, we find -- that Edward Mordrake was the literary creation of Charles Lotin Hildreth. He never really existed.
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