What does Tutankhamun and Joseph Goebbels have in common?
Tutankhamun was the 13th pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom of Egypt who lived over 3300 years ago and Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi politician in Germany and the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, becoming Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. They both allegedly had a clubfoot.
A clubfoot is deformity that is present at birth and occurs 1 to 4 times per 1000 births which makes it a reasonably common issue at birth that obstetricians and midwives routinely screen for it. With a clubfoot one or both feet are rotated in an inward and downward direction. Almost all cases are picked up at birth and treated promptly. Initially they are treated with serial casting to slowly move the foot back into a more normal position. Those that are more rigid and more severe may need a surgical correction.
Most cases respond without any issues and they do not have problems. Some do develop some problems that may show up later in life. These kinds of issues are related to something like the foot not being “100% corrected” following birth, but being say, “85% fixed” which is fine, but over the years of weightbearing and activity there may be some issues with things like aches in some of the joints due to the alignment or maybe things like painful calluses under a metatarsal heads due to too much pressure there. These are quite manageable with inserts in the shoe to change the weightbearing and there are options to deal with the painful calluses. Please get in touch with us if you have any of these long term problems that may be due to a corrected clubfoot when you were a baby.
There is a lot of confusion and debate about Tutankhamun’s clubfoot and Goebbels’ clubfoot. There is no doubt that Tutankhamun did have a genetic disorder (he had a cleft palate), but there is debate if the deformity of his foot due to damage that occurred to the mummy, so the clubfoot could just be a postmortem artifact. Goebbels’ variously described his foot deformity as being due to an infection, an accident or polio. Under German Nazi law, it was possible that his clubfoot was one of the genetic diseases that required compulsory sterilization, so he would not want to be included in that.
