Congenital Malformations in the Past

Abstract

TO DISCUSS the past at a conference designed to consider the future of teratology may seem a superfluous task. Yet the uses of the past are clearly demonstrable in the field of teratology, a science that can be traced to the earliest times of human history. From time immemorial, men and women of all continents and countries have been fascinated by monstrous human beings and animals. In fact, they recorded such curiosities before they learned the arts of reading and writing. This is demonstrated in artistic expressions of very primitive peoples. For instance, a rock drawing found in New South Wales, Australia, shows a double-headed human male figure, 9 feet, 6 inches long, with six fingers on the right hand and four on the left, the remarkable work of an Australian aborigine who felt impelled to put on record an unusual human birth. A beautiful carving of chalk from New Ireland in the South Pacific represents a double-headed human figure with two, or probably, three arms, a case of dicephalus dibrachius well known to modern science. A wooden carving from the Solomon Islands suggests conjoined twins of the pygopagus type with union of the bodies and heads and the extremities shortened by achondroplasia (chondrodystrophy), a systemic skeletal malformation. This anomaly, though known to man for millenia, did not become a scientific entity until 1878 when Parrot¹⁷ recognized it as a disorder of cartilage formation and called it “achondroplasia.”