Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters

  • Rosamond Purcell
Chronicle, February 1998

What is a monster? Is it a thing with a hairy face, extra eyes and missing limbs — or simply anything we do not understand? In Special Cases:Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters (Chronicle, February 1998), Rosamond Purcell tells some macabre legends of monstrosity, ghoulish gossip of scientists and tall tales of early travellers.

These plaster life casts of the faces of people from the Indonesian island of Nias (bottom right) were “made by the nineteenth-century Dutch colonial anthropologist J P. Kleiweg de Zwaan to support his theory of the diversity of evolutionary types within restricted geographical boundaries”. The twins joined at the pelvis (right) have “two heads, two upper bodies and a, (very rare) third vestigial leg”.