Horror, Sleaze and Trash.

The corpse of Julia Pastrana. Pastrana died from complications of childbirth while in Moscow in 1860. Anatomy professor Ivan M. Sokolov performed the autopsy and embalmed her body. Apparently a colleague alerted Mansurov to the autopsy photographs preserved at the Anatomy Institute of Moscow University Medical School, and he included it in a follow-up article on differences between “acquired” and “hereditary” polytrichia. ‘Polytrichia’ is a medical term for excessive hair, and it is now known that Pastrana had a genetic condition called hypertrichosis terminalis.

Pastrana died from complications following the delivery of her son, who also had the same genetic condition. Her son died 3 days after he was born, with Pastrana herself dying 5 days later. Her husband had both her body and the body of her child preserved and later displayed in a glass cabinet. Pastrana only received a proper burial in her native Mexico in 2013, a full 153 years after she had died.