Monopede Freda

London Life www.ftf10.com/wiki/index.php?t… was a magazine, published from the 1920s onwards, that included a number of short stories about amputees. The author of most of these was fond of referring to his one-legged characters as “monopedes”.

However, a couple of these characters were unusual: instead of being skeletally normal (apart from missing a leg), they had a single central leg with a single bilaterally-symmetrical foot with the big toe in the middle. One of them, Freda Simmonds, is pictured here.

There is a real-life condition called sirenomelia, whereby the two legs are fused into one. But as far as I know, there are always still two feet on the end of the fused legs, the feet never fuse into one—at least, not as perfectly as this.