Lina Medina Vasquez was five years old in 1939 and lived in Paurange. It is a remote village in Peru, in the district of Ticrapo. There were no clinics or hospitals in her country. One day, her abdomen became extremely dilated. For this reason, her parents asked for the intervention of the village shaman to heal her – without success. At that point, her mother feared that Lina would have abdominal cancer. As a result, she decided to take her to the hospital in Pisco, to have her examined by a real doctor.
The diagnosis was a shock, even for the doctors. In fact, Lina was not sick – she was seven months pregnant. She was transferred to the hospital in Lima, where she was hospitalized for a month and a half. On May 14, 1939, at the age of five, seven months and twenty-one days, Lina gave birth to her first child. He was a 2.7 kg male and was named Gerardo Alejandro, in honor of the two doctors who had taken care of her (Gerardo Lozada and Alejandro Busalleu). The child was born with a caesarean section, due to the age and the pelvis thinness of the young mother.
Today Lina Medina is almost 90 years old. Never in her life did she want to reveal who the father of the child was. However, her case of extreme early puberty was widely studied. According to the medical reports of the time, published by the researcher Edmundo Escumel in the journal “La Presse Medicale”, Lina had a very early development. In fact, she had her first menstrual cycle at only eight months (two and a half years according to other medical reports). In any case, at the age of four she was already in the middle of her puberty, with her breasts already developed. Escumel explained that this was attributable to an extraordinary hormonal disorder of pituitary origin.
The affair caused a great stir and Lina‘s father was arrested on charges of sexual violence. The man was then excused for lack of evidence. Suspicion also fell on Lina‘s older brother, who was suffering from mental disorders. However, no one has ever discovered the identity of the person who had knocked Lina up. According to some experts, many remote villages of Peru used to celebrate pagan holidays that sometimes ended with group sexual intercourse, which also involved children. This could be the explanation for Lina‘s pregnancy, who perhaps didn’t even know who the child’s father was.