Topical Tens: 28 May: The Dionne Quintuplets

Wednesday 27 May 2020

28 May: The Dionne Quintuplets

The Dionne Quintuplets, famous for being the first set of quintuplets to survive infancy and the only recorded identical quintuplets, were born on this date in 1934. Here are ten interesting facts about them.

The odds of quintuplets (let alone identical ones) is just 1 in 57,289,761. The New York Times once estimated that the chance of identical quins would be one in a billion.
The Dionnes, Oliva-Édouard and Elzire already had five children when the quintuplets were born and went on to have four more afterwards. The family lived on a farm near the village of Corbeil in Ontario, Canada.
Their names, in order of birth, were: Yvonne Édouilda Marie, Annette Lillianne Marie Allard, Cécile Marie Émilda Langlois, Émilie Marie Jeanne, and Marie Reine Alma Houle.
It’s believed there was actually a sixth baby, which was miscarried in the third month of Elzire’s pregnancy.
They were delivered by Dr. Allan Roy Defoe with the help of two midwives, Aunt Donalda and Madame Benoît Lebel. The quintuplets' total weight at birth was 13 pounds, 6 ounces (6.07 kg). Their individual weights were not recorded. For the first days of their lives they had to be watched constantly, fed sweetened Water every two hours and kept warm in front of an open stove.
The first inkling the media got of the unusual birth was when the quintuplets father called the local paper to ask how much they’d charge for announcing the birth of five babies at once. The news soon spread and people began offering assistance and advice. A hospital sent two incubators. There was a darker side to the publicity, however, when Chicago's Century of Progress exhibition got in touch wanting to put the babies on display. It wasn’t unusual back then for babies in incubators to be put on display as tourist attractions. Dr Defoe and the family priest actually persuaded the Dionnes to agree to this. A few days later, the Dionnes changed their minds and tried to claim they hadn’t signed the contract. The exhibitors disputed this and as a result, guardianship of the babies was signed over to The Red Cross for two years, to make sure the quintuplets were well cared for.
At just a few months old, they were moved from their home to a purpose built compound across the road from their parents’ house and lived there until they were nine years old. It was essentially a zoo with an outdoor play area where tourists could come and watch the girls at play through one way screens. There was accommodation for the nurses who took care of them and the police there to guard them and the whole compound was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. They had little contact with the outside world and only saw their parents and siblings occasionally. They lived to a rigid routine which included private tutoring, meals and prayers. Eventually, the money earned from the tourists allowed for a 20 room house to be built for the entire family.
Living together as a family wasn’t as idyllic as you might think. In later years the surviving quins said that their parents often reminded them of the trouble they’d caused by simply being born. They had less privileges and more chores than their siblings and were punished more severely. They even alleged that their father had sexually abused them. When they reached 18, they left home and had little contact with their parents afterwards.
So what did they all do when they grew up? Émilie became a nun, Annette trained as a nurse, and eventually became a librarian. The other three married and had children, including one set of Twins.
Émilie died at the age of 20 from a seizure, and Marie at 35 from a blood clot on the brain. Yvonne died at the age of 67. The other two, at time of writing, are still alive.