Monstrous Births

by

Miriam Rich

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0027

Introduction

The shifting historical category of “monstrous birth” usually referred to the birth of infants with conditions described in later time periods as birth defects, defects of development, congenital anomalies, and/or congenital disabilities. While today it is widely acknowledged that classifying a person as a “monstrosity” is stigmatizing and degrading, the term was routinely used in this way for centuries. In Antiquity, Aristotle defined a monster as an offspring strayed so far from the parental type as to no longer be recognizable as a human being. Monstrous births garnered both elite and popular attention across the medieval and early modern periods. The advent of scientific teratology, defined in the early nineteenth century as the modern scientific study of monstrosity, characterized monstrous births as the product of irregularities in embryological development. The tenets of scientific teratology circulated transnationally, including among medical practitioners in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and China. While traditional accounts of this history assert that new scientific understandings of birth anomaly resulted in the disappearance of the term monstrous births, the words monster/monstrosity did not fully recede from formal medical usage until the mid-twentieth century. The scholarship on the history of monstrous birth can be divided into several major (and sometimes overlapping) approaches. A growing subset of the scholarship situates the topic of monstrous birth within a broader literature on the history of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbearing. This work examines the stories and experiences of women who birthed “monstrous” infants, and analyzes the meanings attached to their childbearing within larger social, political, and gendered contexts. A closely related literature considers the history of medical and obstetric practice surrounding monstrous birth in a variety of national settings. Another major subset of the scholarship examines theories and representations of monstrous birth in scientific, popular, religious, and political culture. While much of the existing literature in this area centers on early modern Europe, some scholars focus on cultural representations of monsters in regions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. A prominent segment of this literature examines how Europeans mobilized theories and representations of monstrosity to justify slavery, colonialism, and imaginaries of racial hierarchy in the Atlantic World. A final major subset of the scholarship, closely associated with disability studies and disability history, focuses on the lives of individuals historically labelled as “freaks” and “monstrosities.” While many conditions that fell under the historical rubric of “monstrous birth” were not compatible with life past early infancy, some individuals identified as “monstrosities” at birth did live into childhood and adulthood. Much of this literature foregrounds the experiences of performers in Victorian-era “freak show” exhibitions and other popular commercial practices of spectacle and display, as well as these individuals’ often exploitative or degrading treatment by an expanding medical profession.

General Overviews

General or broad-ranging overviews of monstrous birth demonstrate the wide variety of disciplinary approaches engaged by this subject. These works reflect the interest of philosophers as well as historians in the history of monstrous birth, and also reflect the influence of feminist studies and disability studies in this literature. In sweeping historical surveys, Wilson 1993 and Asma 2009 present often-celebratory narratives of progress toward a greater scientific and medical understanding of monstrous birth, depicting the Scientific Enlightenment as a distinct turning point in the shift from superstitious and religious explanations of congenital anomaly toward rational scientific ones. In a classic essay, Canguilhem, et al. 1962 similarly identifies the advent of scientific teratology as a pivotal moment that decisively separated the biological phenomenon of “monstrosity” from the moral and cultural significations of “the monstrous.” However, other scholars nuance, complicate, or depart from this overarching narrative of progressive scientific enlightenment. Daston and Park 1998 explores the multiple complexes of emotion that monstrous births evoked across the early modern period, which included fear, pleasure, and disgust. Reagan 2018 offers a wide-ranging chronological overview of monstrous birth that seeks to incorporate discussion of the perspectives of disabled individuals in the present day. Braidotti 1999 and Shildrick 2002 offer feminist philosophical perspectives on monstrosity, discussing historical entanglements between monstrous births and other categories of embodied difference like sex, race, and disability. Taken as a group, these works reflect the heavy focus on early modern Europe in the existing literature on monstrous birth. The literature’s pronounced regional bias is likely related to more general deficits of geographic coverage in some of the broader fields of scholarship this work comes from. It also might be related to the cultural specificity of monstrous birth as a category that applied the term “monster” to newborns with differences of anatomical development, which occurred especially—though not exclusively—in historical European societies. Mittman and Dendle 2012 (cited under Anthologies), Picart and Browning 2012 (cited under Anthologies), and others enlarge the geographic scope of the literature on monstrosity by examining cultural representations of monsters in regions beyond Europe, including in Asia, Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East.

• Asma, Stephen T. “Scientific Monsters: The Book of Nature Is Riddled with Typos.” In On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. By Stephen T. Asma, 138–197. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

  This discussion of “scientific” and “medicalized” monsters appears within a wide-ranging, accessibly written book that offers a sweeping historical survey of monsters in human culture. The analysis offers a mainly celebratory narrative about the triumph of scientific rationality over superstition in the interpretation of birth anomalies. It focuses on the writings of leading physicians, scientists, authors, and philosophers across early modern Europe.

• Braidotti, Rosi. “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences.” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 290–301. New York: Routledge, 1999.

  DOI: 10.1515/9781474471770-035

  Feminist philosopher Braidotti discusses the conceptual entanglement of monstrosity with other categories of embodied difference, especially gender and race. She offers a sweeping periodized history of monstrous births, from Antiquity through to the late twentieth century. She traces the shifting intersections of monstrous birth with racial and sexual discourses across these periods, implicating monstrosity within historical processes of racialization as well as efforts to discipline women’s bodies.

• Canguilhem, Georges, and Therese Jaeger, trans. “Monstrosity and the Monstrous.” Diogenes 10.40 (1962): 27–42.

  DOI: 10.1177/039219216201004002

  This classic essay, translated from the French, offers a philosophical meditation on the meanings and conceptual significance of monsters. In addition to its philosophical analysis, the essay offers a historical argument about the changing relationship between the medical/biological category of “monstrosity” and the moral/cultural category of “the monstrous.” To make this point, the essay provides a sweeping overview of shifting historical understandings of monstrous birth, spanning from Antiquity through to the rise of modern scientific teratology in 19th-century Europe.

• Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. “Monsters: A Case Study.” In Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. By Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, 173–214. New York: Zone Books, 1998.

  In this canonical work, Daston and Park center monstrous births as an important topic of intellectual and cultural history in early modern Europe. The chapter traces a variety of affective orientations toward monstrous birth across this period. Rather than presenting a linear narrative in which one kind of interpretation neatly replaces the next, Daston and Park discuss co-existing interpretations of monstrous births as evocative of horror, pleasure, and disgust in both learned and popular culture.

• Fischer, Jean-Louis, and Jacques Patrick Barbet. “The Birth of a Monstrous Child Throughout History: The Example of Anencephaly between the Egyptian New Empire and the 21st Century.” Medicina Nei Secoli: Arte E Scienza 26.1 (2014): 23–42.

  This essay offers a chronological survey of changing interpretations and reactions to monstrous birth, focusing specifically on the birth of infants with anencephaly (congenital absence of much of the brain and skull). The survey begins in ancient Egypt and ends in the twenty-first century. It charts changing understandings and meanings of anencephaly across this wide stretch of time, emphasizing the variety of imaginative, scientific, and religious explanations for the phenomenon that have emerged.

• Huet, Marie-Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

  Traces ideas about the origins of monstrous birth from classical Antiquity to the Enlightenment. Examines changing historical discourses on the genesis of monstrosity across scientific, medical, philosophical, visual, and literary sources. Particularly examines the attribution of monstrosity to a disordered maternal imagination, analyzing persistent theories of maternal impression or maternal influence that located the cause of monstrous birth within a pregnant woman’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

• Reagan, Leslie J. “Monstrous Births, Birth Defects, Unusual Anatomy, and Disability in Europe and North America.” In The Oxford Handbook of Disability History. Edited by Micheal A. Rembis, Catherine Jean Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen, 385–406. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

  Considers the history of monstrous births in Europe and North America from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Explicitly situating this topic within disability history, the essay incorporates consideration of the perspective of individuals with conditions historically classified as “monstrosities.” The essay also touches on histories of mother blame, public and commercial display, scientific collection, eugenics, impacts of thalidomide and German measles, the institutionalization of disabled children, disability rights movements, and changing attributions and representations of the monstrous.

• Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE, 2002.

  DOI: 10.4135/9781446220573

  Primarily framed as a contribution to critical theory, this book offers a feminist, poststructuralist theorization of the figure of the monster and vulnerable embodiment. The first chapter centrally discusses the history of monstrous birth, offering a survey of attitudes toward and interpretations of anomalous births across a variety of time periods. Subsequent chapters integrate discussion of historical cases of monstrous birth within the book’s broader philosophical analysis.

• Wilson, Dudley. Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 1993.

  Surveys the history of monstrous birth in Europe from the medieval period through the Scientific Enlightenment. Offers a largely triumphalist and teleological narrative of scientific progress, narrating a shift from superstitious to rational scientific interpretations of monstrous birth. Describes how monstrous births, once regarded as signs and portents of divine intervention, became objects of medical and scientific study.