Julia Pastrana

Who was Julia Pastrana?

Julia Pastrana was a woman born with hypertrichosis, who took part in 19th-century exhibition tours in North America and Europe. Pastrana, an indigenous woman from Mexico, was born in 1834, somewhere in the Sierra of Sinaloa State. She was born with a genetic condition, hypertrichosis terminalis; her face and body were covered with straight black hair. Her ears and nose were unusually large, and her teeth were irregular. The latter condition was caused by a rare disease, undiagnosed in her lifetime, Gingival hyperplasia, which thickened her lips and gums. Charles Darwin described her as: "Julia Pastrana, a Spanish dancer, was a remarkably fine woman, but she had a thick masculine beard and a hairy forehead; she was photographed, and her stuffed skin was exhibited as a show; but what concerns us is, that she had in both the upper and lower jaw an irregular double set of teeth, one row being placed within the other, of which Dr. Purland took a cast. From the redundancy of the teeth her mouth projected, and her face had a gorilla-like appearance".