List of fictional characters with situs inversus explained

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 his god complex and seeing himself as exceptional.^[1]
• 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 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 Audrey Niffenegger's novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, the main characters are mirror twins, one of whom, Valentina, has situs inversus.
• In Doppelgänger (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.
• In The Ink Black Heart of the Cormoran Strike series, an online troll named Anomie attacks the co-creators of a cartoon of the same title as the novel, Edie Lewell and Josh Blay. He kills Edie Ledwell, but Blay survives, albeit paralyzed, because he has situs inversus and Anomie did not realize he was not stabbing him in the heart.

Notes and References

1. Nau . Jean-Yves . 2012-10-31 . James Bond a 50 ans et Julius No est toujours vivant . Rev Med Suisse . fr-CH . 360 . 38 . 2102–2103.