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Marta’s notes described a 36-hour delivery, complicated by Sarah’s narrow pelvis and the baby’s unusual position. From birth, Marta, thanks to her expertise, immediately identified the problem: Sarah’s feet were bent so inwards that the soles of the feet were turned inwards. His ankles were twisted at angles that were impossible to reach naturally.
The malformation, called hallux valgus (Talipes aquinina), was so severe that Martha doubted that the baby would ever be able to walk normally. They named him James. Despite his deformed feet, he was breastfed and grew well. Sarah cried with relief to see him alive, seeing it as a true blessing. But when she became pregnant again six months later, Martha expressed her concerns, which Sarah ignored.
The second child, born in May 1892, had a similar clubfoot, but with a peculiarity: his spine was abnormally curved to the left, forming a hump between his shoulder blades that became more pronounced with age. News of this deformity began to spread in the isolated communities scattered throughout these mountains.
The families, at first cordial and friendly, fell out when Sarah gave birth to twins in March 1893. Both suffered from cranial malformations causing skull deformities and an abnormally prominent forehead. The murmurs turned into judgments. A woman tells Martha that God punishes unnatural unions and that people like Sarah and Benjamin should never marry.
Martha’s diary entries became more and more clinical, as if emotional distance could protect her from what she had witnessed. The twins, whom their parents had named David and Daniel, had identical anomalies: disproportionate heads and eyes that were too far apart. Their cognitive development lagged behind normal infants by several months.
They, too, survived, and their screams contributed to the growing chaos in the house. The fourth pregnancy terrified Marta. She begged Sara to stop, explaining to her as gently as possible that each birth caused more and more suffering. Sara refused to talk about it. Whether it was out of religious conviction, denial, or simply acceptance of a situation that was beyond her, she carried her pregnancy to term.
The little girl, born in November 1894, had hands unlike any Martha had ever described. Its fingers had not separated properly during its development, leaving spatulate appendages with slight indentations at the location of the fingers. At that time, the neighboring families ceased all visits. The children were forbidden to approach the Caldwell estate, and the parents warned them that the curse hanging over the family might spread.
The owner of the grocery store in the nearest village refused to give credit, forcing Benjamin’s cousins to do the shopping for the family. The isolation became almost total. Martha continued to attend births, driven by her professional obligations and perhaps also by a morbid fascination with documenting what medical science had never seen.
His notes from this period reveal an inner conflict. In it, she describes a sense of complicity in the unfolding tragedy, while realizing that without her help, mothers and children would likely be marginalized. The moral weight of these pregnancies, each child born with even more serious wounds than the last, tormented her deeply. His diary clearly shows that in 1895, all the protagonists had understood this pattern.
Each pregnancy ended with the birth of a child with severe malformations. Each birth accentuated the isolation of the family. Each new child meant both a life saved and a future marked by irreversible physical disabilities. Despite this, Sarah and Benjamin kept trying, perhaps because of a lack of information about contraception, religious prohibitions, or a deeply human desire to start a family in the face of adversity.
The first four children set a terrifying precedent. Medical records indicated that this was just the beginning. Dr. Garrett’s first visit, in March 1897, was motivated by rumors. However, what turned his curiosity into an obsession was a letter he received three weeks later from Martha Combmes