Five identical sisters who became known as the Dionne Quintuplets were born prematurely in a small village in Ontario, Canada, in May 1934.
Nobody could have known, not even Elzire Dionne, that she was going to give birth to quintuplets. Already a mother of five, the shock of giving birth to five more baby girls—Annette, Émilie, Yvonne, Cécile and Marie—knocked her out for two hours. “What will I do with all them babies?” she reportedly screamed.
Elzire suspected she was carrying twins, but the possibility of quintuplets didn’t cross her mind. And why would it? Doctors say that the odds of naturally occurring quintuplets is about one in 55 million, but the odds of identical quintuplets is incalculable. The Dionnes are the only identical quintuplets ever recorded and the first ever quintuplets known to survive infancy.
The five baby girls were born on May 28, 1934, two months prematurely, near the village of Corbeil in northern Ontario, Canada. Together they weighed only 13 pounds, six ounces (just over 6 kg), with the largest weighing 2-and-a-half pounds, while the smallest was 1 pound, 8-and-a-half ounces. They were barely alive, with serious respiratory problems, and the conditions of the farmhouse, without heat and electricity, were not helping their survival.
Local doctor Allan Roy Dafoe, who was present for the births, did an amazing job keeping the five premature babies alive under difficult circumstances and with no access to medical equipment. He sterilized the farmhouse, kept the babies warm in a wicker basket using hot water bottles or the open oven, and recruited nurses to massage them with olive oil. Before supplies of breast milk could be organized, Dafoe ordered the babies to be fed cow’s milk, sterilized water and corn syrup, mixed with one or two drops of rum for a stimulant.
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