Five identical sisters, called the Dionne Quintuplets, were born early in a small village in Ontario, Canada, in May 1934.
No one, not even their mother Elzire Dionne, knew she was going to have five babies at once. She already had five children, so when she gave birth to five more girls—Annette, Émilie, Yvonne, Cécile, and Marie—she was shocked and fainted for two hours. She reportedly shouted, “What will I do with all these babies?”
Elzire thought she was having twins, but never guessed it would be five. And why would she? Doctors say the chance of having natural quintuplets is about one in 55 million. The chance of having identical quintuplets is even harder to calculate. The Dionne sisters are the only identical quintuplets ever recorded and the first quintuplets known to survive as babies.
The five girls were born on May 28, 1934, two months early, near Corbeil in northern Ontario. Together, they weighed just over 13 pounds (about 6 kg). The biggest baby weighed 2 and a half pounds, and the smallest was only 1 pound, 8 and a half ounces. They were very weak and had serious breathing problems. Their farmhouse had no heat or electricity, making it harder for them to survive.
A local doctor named Allan Roy Dafoe was there when they were born. He did an amazing job helping the babies stay alive with no special medical tools. He cleaned the house carefully, kept the babies warm in a basket using hot water bottles or the oven, and got nurses to massage them with olive oil. Before breast milk was ready, he fed them cow’s milk, sterilized water, and corn syrup mixed with a few drops of rum to help stimulate them.
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