A 78-year-old man passed away, as 78-year-old men tend to do. A routine autopsy was conducted. The examiners made what they called a “serendipitous discovery.” The man had an extremely rare condition—so rare, this is only the second case ever recorded in humans. The man had triphallia, meaning he was born with three penises.
The man’s case was detailed in the Journal of Medical Case Reports by researchers at the University of Birmingham. The only previous recorded case was in an infant born in 2020. Diphallia—which means, you guessed it, only two dicks—is slightly less very-rare, affecting around 1 in 5-6 million live births.
Incredibly, thanks to the odd and unpredictable ways that triphallia presents itself, the man likely lived his entire life completely unaware of his superfluous penises.
Triphallia is when there are three distinct penile shafts, but they don’t present like you imagine they would, which is something akin to a bundle of carrots being held by their bushy green stems. The duplicate penises are usually hidden somewhere near or within the primary visible penis. In the case of the dead 78-year-old man, his two smaller penises were found within his scrotum connected to a single urethra that ran into the primary penis. The man had one normal penis and two smaller penises inside of his nut sack, in other much cruder words.
The formation of a multitude of penises is believed to stem from genetic mutations affecting androgen receptors during fetal development somewhere in the fourth and seven weeks of gestation. The smallest of his three penises didn’t have a urethra, so the researchers believe that it wasn’t functional. It was purely decorative. Since having more than one penis is often asymptomatic and the duplicate penises aren’t visible to the naked eye, most people who have di- or triphallia can live their entire lives without realizing that they have more than one cock.
The guy is too dead to ask now, but the internal positioning of his plethora of penises might have been the reason he likely had urinary tract infections or erectile dysfunction—assuming he suffered from any of that while he was alive. Medical donation laws in the UK mean that there is no other information available about this man other than the fact that he was a man and that he was 78 and now he’s dead, so we may never know what living life with two additional secret penises was like.
The post Dead Man’s Autopsy Shocks Doctors: He Had Three Penises appeared first on VICE.
The post Dead Man’s Autopsy Shocks Doctors: He Had Three Penises appeared first on VICE.
