Frederick Drimmer
The Comprachicos
Human oddities were so highly prized that sometimes, it
seems, they were even made to order. In ‘The Man Who Laughs’,
Victor Hugo told of the comprachicos. The word, in Spanish,
means “buyers of children.” These people, according to
Hugo, purchased young children and deformed them. “They took
a man and made a muzzle; they stunted growth; they distorted
the features.” Then they sold their creations to traveling
carnivals and collectors of human oddities.
Hugo also told of Chinese dealers who took a small child
and put him in a grotesquely shaped porcelain vase without a
top or a bottom. At night they laid the vase on its side, so
the child could sleep; in the morning they set it upright
again. They kept the child in it for years, while his flesh
and bones grew according to its shape. Then they smashed the
vase.
“The child comes out - and, behold, there is a man in the
shape of a mug!”
From “Very Special People”,
By Frederick Drimmer.
Page(s) 21
magazine list
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