Hairy Wild People in History (Hypertrichosis)

Following her death in 1860, this woman was sadly stuffed & displayed as when she was alive. Born with hypertrichosis (werewolf syndrome), her features were gorilla-like; her nose & ears especially large, face covered with hair, & a double pair of teeth. There have been numerous cases of this disease throughout history. Hypertrichosis, also known as werewolf syndrome, is a condition characterized by excessive hair growth anywhere on a person's body. It can affect both women and men, but it's extremely rare. The abnormal hair growth may cover the face and entire body or occur in small patches. The cause of hypertrichosis is unknown. Congenital hypertrichosis is believed to be a genetic disorder that is inherited or occurs as a result of spontaneous mutation.

Also in history, at least five members of the family of Petrus Gonzales, who lived at the French court and then at various Italian courts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were afflicted with a genetic abnormality that causes the body to be covered with hair. Physicians and scientists studied the hairy Gonzales

children and their hairy father, and artists painted their portraits. Building on a book on the Gonzales sisters, The Marvelous Hairy Girls : The Gonzales Sisters and their Worlds, this paper examines the ways in which people living at the time understood and contextualized the male and female members of the Gonzales family. To most people, they evoked animals or animal hybrids, or else the wild folk that lived in Europe’s wilderness areas or across the sea. To a very few, they were simply humans with unwanted hair.

People with this disease were not accepted in society, and called monsters...some people stricken with this disease took to the woods to live (just something to think about when you are out there firing guns at bipedal hairy creatures in the forest). They were referred to as "wild men of the woods" by the townspeople. According to many stories from all over Europe, wild people slept in caves or hollows in trees, ate food they had gathered or animals they had hunted, devouring this raw. Sometimes these wild folk had begun life as normal people, but had left civilization, growing progressively hairier the longer they were away. Most wild men were thought to be violent and fearsome, attacking travelers with clubs or uprooted trees, snatching children, and howling with rage. Not all wild folk were dangerous, however; and some were revered as saints.

Both terrifying and saintly, wild folk were described in stories told to children, epics and romances recited at court and read by the fireside, and books of saints’ lives. They were shown in sculpture, paintings, stained glass, tapestries, and on dishes, chests, drain downspouts, and playing cards. They were in the margins of books, on choir stalls in churches, and on cathedral doors. Everywhere people looked, they saw hairy wild people. Images of wild men became even more common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Europeans were coming into contact with people they regarded as “wild” in Africa and the Americas.

The issue for women is more complicated, however. There were, of course, stories of saintly wild women : Everyone knew about Mary Magdalene, whose life story became more elaborate over the centuries. According to the standard story, Mary and some companions, set adrift by heartless non-believers in a boat without a rudder, landed in southern France. She preached to the local people, winning many converts, and then lived alone in a cave, doing penance for her formerly sinful life. Mary’s body became covered with hair, sometimes shown as beautiful flowing strands and sometimes as rough fur. She became a model for legends of other saintly women whose hair helped protect their honor, making them unattractive to any would-be attacker.

There were other tales of wild hairy women in Europe besides those about saints. In the medieval German epic Wolfdietrich, the hero—who had earlier been saved by a pack of wolves from being killed at the order of his father—encounters Raue Else, a wild woman who runs on all fours toward his fire. She “had a body covered with a thick hairy pelt, slimy and wet like the bride of the devil” and demands that Wolfdietrich love her. He refuses, she turns him into a wild man, he promises to marry her if she will become a Christian, she does, and she then turns back into her former self, a smooth-skinned princess.

Like those of wild men, depictions of wild women became more positive during the sixteenth century, even those who did not magically turn into princesses. On stained glass windows and drinking cups, wild women held up shields with coats-of-arms, often nursing a baby at the same time. Their hair did not interfere with their motherly nurturing as they offered protection and strength to the noble family whose shield they displayed.

In the European imaginary, hairy wild folk could be found not only in nearby forests and hills, but also across the sea. Pliny’s Natural History, copied and recopied throughout the Middle Ages and then published in many editions, described monstrous races in distant parts of the world, including, “the Choromandae, a forest tribe that has no speech but a horrible scream, hairy bodies, keen grey eyes, and the teeth of a dog... [and] the Astomi tribe, that has no mouth and a body hairy all over ; they dress in cottonwool and live only on the air they breathe and the scent they inhale through their nostrils.”

John Mandeville’s Travels, a book purporting to be by an English knight who had traveled in the East, told of “people who walk on their hands and their feet like four-footed beasts : they are hairy and climb up trees as readily as apes.” Further on his voyage was “another isle, where the people are covered in feathers and rough hair, except for the face and the palm of the hand.”

Comparisons with animals or with wild folk were the most common means through which people understood the Gonzales family, but one of the two scientists who examined some of the children put them in a very different framework. On their way from Paris to the Parma courts in Italy, several members of the Gonzales family stopped in Basel. Here Felix Platter was the city physician, and a professor at the renowned university medical school. Among the many medical examinations contained in Observations, his three-volume book of cases, was the following, worth quoting at length.  

Some hairy and exceedingly hirsute men....

It is commonly believed that there are men among the savages with hairy skin on their whole body surface, except for the tip of the nose, the front part of the knees, buttocks, palms, and soles of the feet, as they are usually described. But we can understand that this is false, based on the following.

Cosmographers, who described the whole world, never mention these men, although they never forget the fiercest of peoples, like Amazons, Cannibals, Americans, and others, who walk naked yet are not hairy and shave their naturally growing hair. This, instead, is true : There are humans of both sexes, especially males, whose legs, arms, chest and face are shaggy, with long hair.

In Paris there was one of those men, exceptionally hairy in his whole body, very dear to King Henry II and attending his court, with his whole body covered in long hair, and his face all covered as well, except for a small part under the eyes, with eyebrows and hair on the forehead so long that he had to pull it up to be able to see.

After marrying a hairless woman, similar to other women, he had by her some children, hairy as well, who were sent to the Duke of Parma in Flanders. Mandeville writes, "I saw them, with their mother, a nine-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl, in Basel in 1583, while they were in the process of being sent to Italy, and I made sure to have them portrayed. They were hairy in the face, especially the boy, a little less the girl, whose dorsal region along the vertebra of her spine was exceedingly hairy"

Gummy substances with which to yank out unwanted hair are still with us today (hot wax), of course, and it is tempting to read Platter’s empirical approach and inclusive language as somehow “modern,” while judging the words of those who viewed the Gonzaleses as akin to unreasonable animals or violent wild folk as “premodern.” It is Aldrovandi, however, who is generally viewed as the modern scientist, and his collection forms the core of the natural history museum in Bologna. John Bulwer, who described all bearded women as “monstrous,” was a supporter of the new scientific methodology of Bacon and one of the first to suggest that deaf people could be educated. Most of those who commented on the family

had been trained as humanists or natural scientists, that is, in new styles of learning. Recent interest in the Gonzales family—they or their portraits have been examined in scholarly articles in art history, medical history, anthropology, the history of freaks and marvels, folk-lore, the history of science, genetics, and ethnography—has also emerged among those trained in the newest theories : feminist theory, post-colonial theory, queer theory, disability theory, and yes, even monster theory. We may pride ourselves on having gone beyond those who viewed them as animals or monsters, yet just like people who lived in their own times, we are drawn to the Gonzales family because of the same reason. It’s the hair.


Southern SASquatch Expeditions
Author: Angela Ashton, Founder
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