Edward Mordake

The earliest known published account of Edward Mordake appears in an 1895 Boston Post article by fiction writer Charles Lotin Hildreth; that sensational item presented Mordake as an example among 'human freaks.' The story was reproduced and elaborated in the 1896 miscellany Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, which supplied the most widely circulated picturesque details (the second face female, malignant, whispering of hellish things, Mordake heir to an English peerage). The narrative claims doctors refused to remove the face, that Mordake begged that the face be destroyed before burial 'lest it continues its dreadful whisperings in my grave,' and that he died young (accounts vary between age 22 and 23). Modern archival and critical treatments classify the tale as apocryphal or a hoax, note the lack of corroborating civil or medical records, and observe that some institutional details in the original retellings (for example references to a 'Royal Scientific Society') were likely fictional or fabricated.

In the sensational accounts reproduced in late-19th-century print, Edward Mordake is described as a handsome, well-educated young English gentleman whose natural face is attractive and whose back-of-head anomaly is 'another face' occupying part of the posterior skull. That second face is variously described as female in aspect—'lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil'—with eyes and lips that could express emotions independently (sneering while Mordake was happy, smiling while he wept). The printed narrative reports that the posterior face's eyes tracked observers and its lips 'gibbered without ceasing.' The story presents this morphology as congenital; later commentators note medical conditions such as craniopagus parasiticus, diprosopus, or a parasitic twin only as modern retrospective hypotheses rather than claims documented by the original sources.

The capacities attributed to the posterior face are narrative attributions from the sensational sources: it reportedly made independent facial expressions, its eyes followed onlookers, its lips moved or 'gibbered,' and, critically in the tale, it whispered to Mordake at night 'of such things as they only speak of in Hell,' depriving him of rest and driving him to seclusion and eventual suicide. The accounts also state Mordake sought surgical removal but that 'no doctor would attempt it.' There is no empirical documentation beyond the published anecdote to substantiate literal agency or supernatural capacities.