List of fictional characters with situs inversus

Last updated January 31, 2023

Situs inversus (also called situs transversus or oppositus) is a congenital condition in which the major visceral organs are reversed or mirrored from their normal positions. Several fictional characters have reversed organs.

In the Ian Fleming novel Dr. No , the eponymous villain Julius No explains that he once survived a certain death by execution as his heart is located on his right side, which his would-be-assassin did not know when he fired at No’s heart at point-blank range. No, already near death from torture and mutilation, survives and the event helps nurture a god complex and seeing himself as exceptional.
At the DC Comics Universe, all the inhabitants of Earth 3 have their organs in an inverse position, and is possible to identify them in this way.
Souther, from the manga Fist of the North Star , has dextrocardia with situs inversus totalis, making him immune to the normal applications of Kenshiro's Hokuto Shinken fighting style, since Souther's organs—and thus, his pressure points—are reversed from where they would normally be. This highly advantageous condition is referred to by Souther as his 'Emperor's Armour', and in his first fight with Kenshiro, he uses this advantage to easily defeat his opponent. During their final confrontation, Kenshiro uncovers the secret to Souther's body, allowing him to hold his own and ultimately defeat Souther in a decisive final battle.
In an episode of the television show In Plain Sight, an ATF agent survives an attempt on his life because his heart is on the right side of his body.
In the WB series Jack & Jill , Simon Rex played a young man with situs inversus.
Fortune, from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty . Revolver Ocelot points this out when he shoots Fortune on the left side of her chest, then remembers and states that her heart was on the right side.
In an ER episode entitled "Freak Show", Romano, Benton and Corday operate on a unique case involving a boy with reversed organs.
In a story called The Trap, which H. P. Lovecraft helped write, one of the characters is sucked into an interdimensional rift by an antique mirror. When he returns, his organs and his handedness (which hand is dominant) are both reversed.
In Margaret Mahy's novel The Tricksters, the character Hadfield is said to be an exact mirror image of his otherwise identical twin Felix, including having his vital organs in mirror-image layout.
In the Lord Peter Wimsey short story The Image in the Mirror by Dorothy Sayers, a character with reversed organs has long been haunted by dreams of a doppelgänger and by fears that he himself might be only the reflection of someone else.
In the A. E. van Vogt short story The Search, the unique trait of people who can travel through time is that they have reversed internal organs.
In the Max Brooks novel World War Z , a character describes operating on a patient who had dextrocardia with situs inversus, and transplants a heart from someone with the same condition. Unbeknownst to him, the transplant heart is infected with the virus Solanum, thus turning the patient into a zombie.
In the science fiction novel Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny the character Fred Cassidy goes through a device that completely reverses the left-right symmetry of his entire body (even to the point where he perceives writing and other images as their mirror image). The fact that his heart is on the wrong side ends up saving him from being killed by a bullet wound.
In the science fiction short story Technical Error by Arthur C. Clarke, character Richard Nelson is inverted laterally in an industrial accident where his body exists in a fourth spatial dimension due to a short circuit at the power plant where he works, which caused a strong, but unstable magnetic field. Doctors find he is unable to digest food due to the nutrient molecules being incompatible with his reversed enzymes and receptors. Efforts to re-invert him prove catastrophic.
In the Hindi movie Luck (2009), the character 'Ram' has his heart on the right side instead of the left which saves his life.
In the Bengali detective novel Shajarur Kanta (Porcupine's Quill), featuring detective Byomkesh Bakshi, a character survives a stab wound to the chest because his heart is located on the right side, a fact unknown to his assailant.
In Audrey Niffenegger's novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, the main characters are mirror twins, one of whom, Valentina, has situs inversus.
In the movie Ninja Assassin , a Europol agent Mika gets stabbed where her heart should be. Everyone thinks her to be dead, but then Raizo proclaims that her heart is "special" (meaning on the right side instead of left), and she survives. Also, in the beginning of the movie there is an old man, a tattoo artist, who should have died 57 years ago from a sword to the heart, but survived because his heart was located on the right side of the body as well.
In 2008 horror movie The Broken protagonist Gina McVey, a radiologist, is seen discussing a patient with Dextrocardia situs inversus early in the film.
In Roll Call - book 3 of the series Traces, a character called Emily Wonder has the condition.
In the manga Black Jack, the protagonist has a patient who has situs inversus totalis, in which he operates using a mirror that Pinoko provided so that he can see the organs "normally".
Helena from the series Orphan Black was discovered to have situs inversus totalis after surviving a gunshot wound that would otherwise have pierced her heart.
In Doppelgänger (1969 film) (also known as Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) astronauts from Earth land on a parallel planet on the other side of the Sun where everything is a mirror image of what it is on Earth. When one of the astronauts dies, X-rays from his post-mortem exam reveal that his internal organs are located on the wrong side of his body.
De Rode Ridder, the main character of the eponymous Flemish comic has situs inversus after he passed through a magical mirror (album 58), which later on saves his life by making a crossbow bolt narrowly miss his heart (album 208).
In the aptly titled mission in the 2016 game Hitman, Agent 47 must assassinate Erich Soders, who is afflicted with Situs Inversus and sold out his employer, the International Contract Agency, to secure a heart transplant at a confidential Japanese hospital. A possible alternative to directly killing him is to destroy his replacement heart, leaving him on the operating table without a viable replacement. This mission also references the rarity of finding a right sided donor heart by hinting that an illegal black market organ trade occurred to obtain a right sided heart from a homeless Brazilian boy.
In the H. G. Wells' short story The Plattner Story, the protagonist, Gottfried Plattner, experiences an explosive chemical accident that has the result of reversing his body, after traversing through an alternate dimension.

Related Research Articles

Christiaan Neethling Barnard was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant operation. On 3 December 1967, Barnard transplanted the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall into the chest of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, with Washkansky regaining full consciousness and being able to talk easily with his wife, before dying eighteen days later of pneumonia, largely brought on by the anti-rejection drugs that suppressed his immune system. Barnard had told Mr. and Mrs. Washkansky that the operation had an 80% chance of success, an assessment which has been criticised as misleading. Barnard's second transplant patient, Philip Blaiberg, whose operation was performed at the beginning of 1968, returned home from the hospital and lived for a year and a half.

A brain transplant or whole-body transplant is a procedure in which the brain of one organism is transplanted into the body of another organism. It is a procedure distinct from head transplantation, which involves transferring the entire head to a new body, as opposed to the brain only. Theoretically, a person with complete organ failure could be given a new and functional body while keeping their own personality, memories, and consciousness through such a procedure. Neurosurgeon Robert J. White has grafted the head of a monkey onto the headless body of another monkey. EEG readings showed the brain was later functioning normally. Initially, it was thought to prove that the brain was an immunologically privileged organ, as the host's immune system did not attack it at first, but immunorejection caused the monkey to die after nine days. Brain transplants and similar concepts have also been explored in various forms of science fiction.

Dextrocardia is a rare congenital condition in which the apex of the heart is located on the right side of the body, rather than the more typical placement towards the left. There are two main types of dextrocardia: dextrocardia of embryonic arrest and dextrocardia situs inversus. Dextrocardia situs inversus is further divided.

Situs inversus is a congenital condition in which the major visceral organs are reversed or mirrored from their normal positions. The normal arrangement of internal organs is known as situs solitus. Although cardiac problems are more common, many people with situs inversus have no medical symptoms or complications resulting from the condition, and until the advent of modern medicine, it was usually undiagnosed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Primary ciliary dyskinesia</span> Medical condition

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare, autosomal recessive genetic ciliopathy, that causes defects in the action of cilia lining the upper and lower respiratory tract, sinuses, Eustachian tube, middle ear, Fallopian tube, and flagella of sperm cells. The alternative name of "immotile ciliary syndrome" is no longer favored as the cilia do have movement, but are merely inefficient or unsynchronized. When accompanied by situs inversus the condition is known as Kartagener syndrome.

Situs ambiguus is a rare congenital defect in which the major visceral organs are distributed abnormally within the chest and abdomen. Clinically heterotaxy spectrum generally refers to any defect of Left-right asymmetry and arrangement of the visceral organs; however, classical heterotaxy requires multiple organs to be affected. This does not include the congenital defect situs inversus, which results when arrangement of all the organs in the abdomen and chest are mirrored, so the positions are opposite the normal placement. Situs inversus is the mirror image of situs solitus, which is normal asymmetric distribution of the abdominothoracic visceral organs. Situs ambiguus can also be subdivided into left-isomerism and right isomerism based on the defects observed in the spleen, lungs and atria of the heart.

Lung transplantation, or pulmonary transplantation, is a surgical procedure in which one or both lungs are replaced by lungs from a donor. Donor lungs can be retrieved from a living or deceased donor. A living donor can only donate one lung lobe. With some lung diseases, a recipient may only need to receive a single lung. With other lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis, it is imperative that a recipient receive two lungs. While lung transplants carry certain associated risks, they can also extend life expectancy and enhance the quality of life for those with end stage pulmonary disease.

Situs solitus is the medical term referring to the normal position of thoracic and abdominal organs. Anatomically, this means that the heart is on the left with the pulmonary atrium on the right and the systemic atrium on the left along with the cardiac apex. Right-sided organs are the liver, the gall bladder and a trilobed lung as well as the inferior vena cava, while left-sided organs are the stomach, single spleen, a bilobed lung, and the aorta.

Levocardia is where the heart is on the normal side of the body, as opposed to dextrocardia, in which the heart is in the right side of the thoracic cavity. This can be associated with situs solitus, where the remainder of the organs are on normal side as well; or situs inversus, in which the viscera on the opposite side as normal. The latter condition may or may not be associated with clinically relevant abnormalities.

Pig-Heart Boy is a children's novel by Malorie Blackman, which was first published in 1997. Described by the Guardian as 'A powerful story' it shows the life of a teenage boy with a viral heart transplant. It was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The novel was adapted into a television series, which was broadcast by Children's BBC in 1999.

<i>The Broken</i> (film) 2008 French film

The Broken is a 2008 French-British horror film written and directed by Sean Ellis and starring Lena Headey.

Cold Hands, Warm Heart is a young adult novel by Jill Wolfson. It was first published in 2009 by Henry Holt and Company. This is Jill Wolfson's latest novel and it addresses subjects like life-threatening illness, loss, and the gift of life through organ donation.

Oppositus is a Latin term meaning opposite.

Chirality is a property of asymmetry important in several branches of science. The word chirality is derived from the Greek χειρ (kheir), "hand", a familiar chiral object.

Organ transplantation is a common theme in science fiction and horror fiction. Numerous horror movies feature the theme of transplanted body parts that are evil or give supernatural powers, with examples including Body Parts, Hands of a Stranger, and The Eye.

(HES7) or bHLHb37 is protein coding mammalian gene found on chromosome 17 in humans. HES7 is a member of the Hairy and Enhancer of Split families of Basic helix-loop-helix proteins. The gene product is a transcription factor and is expressed cyclically in the presomitic mesoderm as part of the Notch signalling pathway. HES7 is involved in the segmentation of somites from the presomitic mesoderm in vertebrates. The HES7 gene is self-regulated by a negative feedback loop in which the gene product can bind to its own promoter. This causes the gene to be expressed in an oscillatory manner. The HES7 protein also represses expression of Lunatic Fringe (LFNG) thereby both directly and indirectly regulating the Notch signalling pathway. Mutations in HES7 can result in deformities of the spine, ribs and heart. Spondylocostal dysostosis is a common disease caused by mutations in the HES7 gene. The inheritance pattern of Spondylocostal dysostosis is autosomal recessive.

"The Plattner Story" is a short story by English writer H. G. Wells, first published in 1896 in The New Review. It was included in The Plattner Story and Others, a collection of short stories by Wells first published in 1897, and in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, a collection of his short stories first published in 1911. In the story, a man recounts his experiences in a parallel world, which he speculates is some form of Afterlife.

The Heart is a 2014 realistic and medical fiction novel by the French author Maylis de Kerangal. It chronicles the events immediately following the death of 19-year-old Simon Limbres in a car accident. In particular, The Heart focuses on the transplantation of Simon's heart and how it affects those involved in the process, including Simon's parents, the physicians, the nurses, the organ transplant coordinators, the recipient, and the recipient's family, over the course of twenty-four hours.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Keating</span> Fictional character on BBC

Ed Keating is a fictional character from the BBC medical drama Holby City, played by actor Rocky Marshall. He first appeared in the series four episode "New Hearts, Old Scores", broadcast on 13 August 2002. Ed arrives at Holby City hospital to work as a cardiothoracic registrar. Ed is characterised as an ambitious "working class" man who learns how to survive hospital politics. He is "extremely loyal" but his aggressive tempter sometimes leads him into trouble. Producers introduced him alongside Tom Campbell-Gore and Ed becomes his protégé. Writers concocted various surgical dilemmas involving organ transplants, which the duo solve in unorthodox ways. Their continued rule breaking sets them both on a journey to disgrace. They forge test results, lie to patients, carry out organ transplants without any consent and Ed lets Tom operate under the influence of alcohol.

Isolated levocardia is a rare type of organs' situs inversus in which the heart is still in normal position but other abdominal viscera are transposed. Isolated levocardia may occur with heart defects and patients without having operations have low life expectancy: only about 5% to 13% of patients survive more than 5 years. Therefore, even though the risk of cardiac surgeries is high, once patients are diagnosed, operations are suggested to be held as soon as possible. Isolated levocardia is congenital. So far, there is not sufficient evidence to prove that chromosome abnormalities will result in isolated levocardia, and the cause of isolated levocardia is still unknown.

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