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Suddenly, something went terribly wrong in his body. His mother’s diary, which Garrett later discovered through his family, described this transformation with increasing horror. Benjamin began to eat astronomical amounts of food without ever feeling full. Its weight doubled in one year, then doubled again.
At 16 years old, he weighed 136 kg. At 20 years old, he weighed more than 181 kg. A Lexington doctor examined him in 1887 and diagnosed what he called pituitary dysfunction. Although medical knowledge of these conditions was still rudimentary, the doctor’s report, preserved in the Kentucky Medical Society archives, noted that Benjamin’s body seemed unable to regulate its own growth signals.
In 1888, his father made a heartbreaking decision. Unable to support his son, who was draining the resources of six children and could no longer work in the fields, he had Benjamin admitted to the same Louisville retirement home where Sarah lived. The two marginalized people met in this austere establishment. Sarah saw in Benjamin much more than his grotesque appearance: she perceived the gentle and sensitive man in him.
For the first time in years, Benjamin met someone who did not shudder at the sight of him. The trustees of the charity, no doubt relieved by the end of their suffering, authorized the marriage in 1889. The couple left Louisville with gifts and headed to the most remote place they could find in Harland County, where Benjamin’s distant cousins reluctantly allowed them to build a cabin on a vacant lot.
In his research, Garrett concluded that the most troubling factor was not the individual situation, but their convergence. Both parents had genetic abnormalities so severe that they could not lead a normal life. Both had been rejected by families overwhelmed by their needs. Both had taken refuge in the mountains, sheltered from social judgment.
Out of ignorance, desperation and a simple human need to start a family, they decided to have children. The medical literature of 1897 offered no indication in this case. Heredity was still a poorly understood science. Gregor Mendel’s work on genetic inheritance, published decades earlier, had been largely ignored by the medical community.
No one could have predicted what would happen when two people with such different genetic backgrounds tried to give birth together. Sarah and Benjamin, without knowing it, embodied this tragic experience that nature itself sometimes stages, an experience that medicine is only just beginning to understand. When Garrett closed his notebook after recording their story, he realized that what he had witnessed may have been unprecedented in the history of medicine.
A simple question haunted him: had anyone thought to warn them of what was coming? And if they had known, would they have made a different choice? Sarah discovered that she was pregnant in the spring of 1890. A local midwife, Martha Combmes, recorded the event in her detailed diary, now held at the Harland County Historical Society.
What had started as cautious optimism turned to terror as the pregnancy progressed. Sarah’s frail figure struggled to accommodate the growing baby. By the sixth month, she could barely walk. Benjamin himself, almost motionless, could only give him minimal physical help. The delivery, which took place in January 1891, almost cost her her life.