From the Rocks Deucalion had dropped behind Was fashioned the living flesh of humankind How was it then done, that a tender babe well formed was, by reversal, into solid rock transformed?

- Jean D'Ailleboust, 1582.

In the spring of 1582, twenty-eight years after not giving birth, Madam Colombe Chatri would pass away.

That her pregnancy had failed wasn't terribly surprising, this was medieval France, after all. That she had lasted so long despite it, however, somewhat was.

Because, on that day, though her water had broken and labor arrived, no child had come out.

For the rest of her life, Madame Chatri would suffer poor health. Weak appetite and abdominal pain would plague her, alongside a strange, hard lump in her midriff that never seemed to go away.

The opinion of the local gossips in her hometown of Sens, and indeed the woman herself, was that the baby was to blame.

It was a theory her husband must have shared, as after her passing, he would seek out a surgeon to have her body dissected.

In the end, he would find two.

At first, Claude Le Noir And Lehan Couttas, didn't expect anything too fantastic - a tumor, probably, nothing more. But as they cut through the layers of the corpse, what they uncovered would turn out to be nothing less than a medical sensation.

When pregnancies go wrong, but the mother survives, there are a few different ways the body can respond.

If the fetus is still small, about three months or younger, it's typically re-absorbed, broken back down into its base components for the host.

When death occurs at a stage too large for re-absorbtion, but everything is still in the right place, the human body can auto-abort a failed conceptus, ejecting it into the outside world and leaving the carrier free to try again.

Any larger, however, or seeded outside its correct place in the womb, and getting rid a dead fetus becomes much more difficult.

Still, there were tools which existed, even then, for the express purpose of extracting body parts from the mother. In chunks, if need be.

Should she find herself stuck despite all this, bound with a failed pregnancy too far along and impossible to extract, her chances of survival start to falter.

And even if she managed to pull through, what happened next would often depend as much on blind luck as her body's ability to cope.

Sometimes, it skeletonized. The flesh sloughing off or disintegrating to leave behind the bones. Now inoffensive to the body, the remains could easily be left to jostle around inside the mother for the rest of her life.

Sometimes, it adipocerated, soft tissues converting into a brown, soap-like substance commonly known as grave wax.

Other times, it suppurated, (became infected and filled with pus). While the womb is initially a sterile enviroment, it's very possible for bacteria from elsewhere to infiltrate and begin feeding off the corpse.

But sometimes, when conditions inside the body are just right, the corpse will become infused with calcium salts, creating a very rare, unique kind of mummy..

It was this last option that Le Noir and Couttas would discover, and the doctors they ran to fetch would soon know it by its title: The lithopedian of Sens.

Lithopedians, derived from the Greek word for stone (lithos), and child (paidion), are the byproduct of an extra-uterine pregnancy, an unsurvivable condition for the fetus, and quite dangerous for the mother.

Should she survive, however, and the enviroment remain favorable, a lithopedian has a chance to form in one of three ways.

Lithotecnon are caused when the fetus, and the fetus alone, becomes calcified. They do not always retain their faces, but those that do tend to look particularly ghostly.

Lithokeliphos, on the other hand, are the opposite of lithotecnons, where the placental membrane becomes calcified, but the fetus does not. To the untrained eye, they don't look like anything much; just odd, venous ovals, difficult to identify as something that could come from the human body at all.

The lithopedian dug out of old Madame Chatri's corpse, however, was neither a lithotecnon nor a lithokeliphos, but a lithokeliphopedians.

A lithokeliphopedian is what happens when both fetus and membrane become calcified together, and it is a true tragedy that one of the first things Le Noir and Couttas did when they discovered it was hack the outer shell to pieces, being much more interested in the secrets it held inside.

Of the doctors who were brought in to witness the reveal, Jean D'Ailleboust stands out. It was he who would publish the best selling pamphlet of the lithopedian of Sens. D'Aillebousts work was not only a best-seller, but a historical first: Before this time, there was no written work on this subject.

There are other sources on the internet that will deny this claim, pointing instead to a 10th century physician named Albucasis as the first to record lithopedianism, but after finding a translation of his work and digging up the relevant passage, I believe there is a fair argument to be made this is not the case.

In his work, On Surgery and Instruments, Albucasis describes it thus:

"
Now I myself once saw a woman who had become pregnant and the fetus had then died in utero: Then again she conceived and the second fetus also died: And after a long while she got a swelling in the umbilicus which grew and eventually it opened and began to produce pus.

I was called in to attend her, and I treated her for a long while, but the wound did not heal up, so I applied certain strongly drawing ointments, and then a bone came away from the place; and then a few days passed and another bone came out; and I was mightily astonished at this, seeing that the abdomen was a place where there are no bones.

I formed the opinion that these were bones from a dead fetus. So I investigated the place and got out many bones belonging to the head of a dead fetus.

I continued this procedure and got a great number of bones out of her, the woman being in the best of health, indeed she lived for quite a while like that, with a little pus being exuded from that place.
"

While this does seem to describe an extra-uterine pregnancy, there is no indication of calcification on the remains. Based off the passage itself, it seems more like some manner of suppuration, instead.

If true, then granting Albucasis the title of the first man to ever record a lithopedian is a case of pure error. As fetuses only calcify when their enviroment remains sterile, and only suppurate when that sterility is lost. His description of pus coming out of the hole opened up in the mother in this regard is damning.

No, until a more robust proof may be found, this honor should go to D'Ailleboust.

While the Lithopedian of Sens itself is now lost, a few depictions of what it looked like remain. The earliest, and oddly enough, least helpful, again come from D'Ailleboust, who likely edited some erotic art with the relevant details of Madame Chatri and her unborn child drawn in.

Ambrose Pare, one of the greatest surgeons of the era, had a chance to see it early on. From his artwork, it's quite clear that the Lithopedian of Sens was a very complete specimen, human enough to make one wonder how far along Colombe Chatri must have been before her gestation failed.

after that, the only other known depictions comes a century or so later, from Thomas Bartholin, an anatomist, and his nephew, Holgher Jacobsen. D'Ailleboust had sold the specimen to a wealthy merchant some time after aquiring it, and it had bounced from one curio collection to another over the years, becoming progressively more worn with time.

With bits broken off, bones showing, and its skin stained black, the former marvel would manage to last all the way into the 19th century. Until one day, between a transfer from one museum to another, the lithopedian of Sens was simply gone.

Even now, no one is entirely sure how it was lost. The leading theory is one of the museum directors used the move as an opportunity to toss it out.

As times change, so does culture. Where once Madame Chatri's stone child was a treasure, in the eyes of more "modern" curators, it was more of an embarrassment. An ugly, decayed reminder of a less enlightened era.

Should this be true, then the real shame lies with them, not D'Ailleboust or any of his 16th century ilk. Because the thing is, the Lithopedian of Sens truly was a medical marvel: An incredibly rare, high profile example of fetal calcification, worthy of a museum for its sheer age at that point as much as anything else.

To throw away such an artifact out of some personal, petty-minded notion of "real science" or "proper history" - that's the true dark age mindset. To have lost the Lithopedian of Sens after over 200 years of preservation because of it is a genuine shame.

Had it survived to the present day, I, for one, would have liked to see it.

There have been other lithopedians discovered throughout the years, most notably a Lithokeliphos excavated from an ancient cemetery in Kerr county, Texas. It's a 3100 year old specimen, and the primary reason why I had to differentiate between the oldest recorded lithopedian, as opposed to the oldest overall.

Human history is long, and there have been failed and complicated pregnancies all throughout it, but the ones that make an impact - the landmark cases, the big discoveries, the ones that inspire poetry and awe; Those are something special.

The long, strange afterlife of Madame Chatri's unborn child is among them, perhaps especially now that it is gone. The ghost of a ghost, dead thing born from a dead woman, treasured, then destroyed.