She was the "biggest foot" woman in history, with 48 cm long and 18 cm wide, her shoes made of three goatskins and her socks made of pillowcases.
Born in England around 1860, fanny Mills immigrated to Ohio with her family. Her other sisters were all normal, but from the beginning, her parents knew she was something different.
At a very young age, Fanny developed Milroy's disease, a disease characterized by lymphedema (painful swelling and effusion) that usually occurs in the legs and is caused by congenital anomalies in the lymphatic system. This is an extremely rare disease in which the vast majority of patients are female.
She looks like a normal woman from the waist up, but her legs and feet are much larger than ordinary people. As she grew older, her feet grew larger, and by adulthood, there were reports that they were 19 inches long (about 48 centimeters) long and 7 inches (about 18 centimeters) wide.
The most popular saying about her big feet is that she wears shoes made of three goatskins and socks made of pillowcases.
Her feet looked like two huge hams. The toes are irregular, and the little toes have two small bumps. The reporter who visited the family earlier said: "Where there should be toenails, there are no toenails." ”
Her illness made it difficult for her to walk, and she had to make a living by participating in "deformity shows," and in the 1880s she played the role of "Ohio Bigfoot Girl" at the Dime Museum on the East Coast of the United States. Because of her difficulty in daily mobility, she was accompanied by a nurse named Mary Brown.
Fanny's weekly salary was about $150, which was a significant amount at the time, about $4,000 today.
Visiting the Dime Museum was a popular pastime for many Americans at the time. For a dime, they'll see all sorts of weird people like Fanny, and the physical condition of the "deformity show" performers leaves them with no choice but to exhibit themselves.
Because Fanny was popular among the museum's audience, the operators came up with a new strategy to promote her. They brutally advertise that if anyone wants to marry Fanny, her father will pay her son-in-law $5,000 and a farm.
In fact, this is a lie, because Fanny's father had died and had never owned a farm, but the strategy was successful, and many bachelors bought tickets for huge "dowries" to see her.
Fanny married William Brown, the brother of nurse Mary Brown, in 1886, and in 1887 she gave birth to a stillborn child. Her health suffered as a result, leading to her retirement from the Dime Museum in 1892.
Fanny and her husband died shortly after returning to Ohio at the age of 39.
