In 1939, five-year-old Lina Medina was brought to a small hospital in the town of Pisco, Peru by her concerned father from their small village in the Andes mountains. He told the doctors that the shamans in his village had been unable to cure his daughter of the growing tumor that had visibly distended her stomach. Upon examination, the doctors discovered a truth stranger than fiction: little Lina was seven months pregnant. Her father told the astonished doctors that Lina had began menstruating at two-and-a-half years old, and that she had begun developing breasts as a four-year-old.

At the age of 5 years, 7 months and 21 days, Lina gave birth to a healthy 6 lb. baby boy by caesarean section on Mother’s Day (May 14, 1939). She named the boy Gerardo, after Dr. Gerardo Lozado, the doctor who had performed the surgery. After further research, it was discovered that Lina had actually began menstruating at eight-months-old, and that she had the ovaries of a mature woman. Researchers concluded that her precocious puberty was probably the result of a pituitary hormonal disorder.

Lina never revealed the identity of her son’s father, and the circumstances surrounding her impregnation remain a mystery. Her father was initially arrested on suspicions of rape and incest, but the charges were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Gerardo was initially raised in the Medina household as though he was Lina’s baby brother: he discovered the truth when he was ten-years-old, after suffering taunts from schoolmates. Sympathetic to Lina’s plight, Dr. Lozado supported her through high school, and she subsequently went to work for him as a secretary at his clinic. She eventually married and gave birth to a second son in 1972.

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