Lina Medina's parents thought their five-year-old daughter had a huge abdominal tumour and when shamans in their remote village in Peru's Andes
could find no cure, her father carried her to hospital.

Just over a month later, she gave birth to a boy.

Aged five years, seven months and 21 days when her child was born by caesarean section in May 1939, Medina made medical history, and is still the youngest known mother in the world.

At the time, Peru's government promised armfuls of aid that never materialized. Six decades on, Medina lives with her husband in a cramped house in a poor, crime-ridden district of the Peruvian capital known as "Little Chicago." Now 68, she keeps to herself and has long refused requests to rake up the past. Gerardo, the son she delivered while still a child herself, died in 1979 at the age of 40.

But a new book, written by an obstetrician who has been interested in her case, has drawn fresh attention to Medina's story, and raised the prospect that the Peruvian government may belatedly offer her financial and other assistance.

"The government condemned them to live in poverty. In any other country, they would be the objects of special care," Jose Sandoval, author of Mother Aged 5, said.

"We still have time to repair the damage done to her. That's my fundamental objective," he added.

Sandoval has raised Medina's case with the office of first lady Eliane Karp, and has asked the government to grant her a life pension -- something officials say is possible.

"We're totally willing to help her," spokeswoman Marta Castaneda said. But Suni Ramos, of the social action department of Karp's office, said that before the government could grant her a pension or any other of the aid it was already planning -- such as kitchen and other household equipment -- it needed to talk to her to discuss what she wanted and needed.

Medina's husband, Raul Jurado, said his wife remained skeptical. "She got no help (in 1939) that I know about," he said. "She thinks governments never deliver. Maybe today there will be a promise that will never come true."

Jurado said his wife, whose story is a medical textbook classic and whose case is confirmed as true by such bodies as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, had turned down a request for an interview.

No one has ever established who was the father of Medina's child, or confirmed she became pregnant after being raped.

One of nine children born to country folk in Ticrapo, an Andean village at an altitude of 2,250 metres in Peru's poorest province, Medina is believed to be
the youngest case of precocious puberty in history, Sandoval said.

He said she had her first period at two and a half, became pregnant at age four years and eight months and that when doctors performed the caesarean to deliver her baby, they found she already had fully mature sexual organs.

Her swelling stomach worried her parents. "They thought it was a tumour," he said. But shamans ruled out village superstitions -- including one in which locals believed a snake grew inside a person until it killed them --and recommended they take her to hospital in the nearest big town, Pisco.

There came the staggering diagnosis that she was pregnant.

Her father was temporarily jailed on suspicion of incest -- he was later released for lack of evidence -- and doctors, police and even a film crew set off
for her village for preliminary investigations into her case.

Sandoval, who based his book on media and other published information, and some interviews with relatives as Medina herself declined to comment, said news of the child mother-to-be drew instant offers of aid, including one worth $5,000 from a U.S. businessman, which was turned down.

More offers followed after Medina was transferred to a Lima hospital, where her fully developed six-pound baby was born on Mother's Day, May 14, 1939.

One offer was worth $1,000 a week, plus expenses, for Medina and her baby to be exhibited in a world fair in New York.

Another, from a U.S. business that the family accepted in early June 1939, was for the pair to travel to the United States for scientists to study the case.

The offer included setting up a fund to ensure their lifelong financial comfort.

But within days, the state trumped all previous offers, decreeing that Medina and her baby were in "moral danger," and resolving to set up a special commission to protect them.

But Sandoval said: "It abandoned the case after six months ... It did absolutely nothing for them."

Though physically mature, Medina -- who Sandoval said was mentally normal and showed no other unusual medical symptoms -- still behaved like a child, preferring to play with her dolls instead of the new baby, who was fed by a wet nurse.

After taunting from schoolmates, Gerardo -- who was named after one of the doctors who attended Medina and who became their mentor -- discovered when he was 10 that the woman he had grown up believing to be his sister was in fact his mother.

He died in 1979 from a disease that attacks the body's bone marrow, but Sandoval said it was not clear there was any link with his illness and the fact his mother had been so young.

Medina herself married and in 1972 had a second son, 33 years after her first.

Her second child now lives in Mexico.

The couple's main concern now is to see if the government's offer of aid was genuine and if their story will finally have a happy ending.

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