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Shortly after birth they varied in size and proportion, as the breasts were full or empty, and in five weeks all traces of them were lost. Her only married sister had similar enlargements at her third confinement. Polymazia sometimes seems to be hereditary. Robert saw a daughter whose mother was polymastic, and Woodman saw a mother and eldest daughter who each had three nipples.
Peuch in 1876 collected 77 cases, and since then Hamy, Quinqusud, Whiteford, Engstrom, and Mitchell Bruce have collected cases. Polymazia must have been known in the olden times, and we still have before us the old images of Diana, in which this goddess is portrayed with numerous breasts, indicating her ability to look after the growing child.
Leichtenstern, who has collected 70 cases of polymazia in females and 22 in males, thinks that accessory breasts or nipples are due to atavism, and that our most remote inferiorly organized ancestors had many breasts, but that by constantly bearing but one child, from being polymastic, females have gradually become bimastic.
He discusses the idea that woman was meant to bear more than one child at a birth, using as his argument the existence of the double nipple and mamma, to which might be added the not infrequent occurrence of polymazia. In March, 1736, in a dairy cellar in the Strand, London, a poor woman gave birth to 3 boys and 9 girls.
Excessive development of the mammae, generally being a pathologic phenomenon, will be mentioned in another chapter. However, among some of the indigenous negroes the female breasts are naturally very large and pendulous. The breasts are sufficiently pendulous and loose to be easily thrown over the shoulder. Polymazia is of much more frequent occurrence than is supposed.
Martin gives a very clear illustration of a woman with a supernumerary breast below the natural organ. Sneddon, who has collected quite a number of cases of polymazia, quotes the case of a woman who had two swellings in each axilla in which gland-structure was made out, but with no external openings, and which had no anatomic connection with the mammary glands proper.
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