The meaning of the word ‘monster’ has undergone drastic variations throughout history. The word involves a twofold Latin root — ‘monstrum’, from monere (to warn) or monstrare (to exhibit) — and was in principle the equivalent of the Greek teras, meaning sign or warning. The ‘monsters’ of the classical world were thus those signs, not necessarily of human or animal origin, that were clearly identifiable as such, and teratology, the science that studied those signs, was simply a different form of divination. It must be emphasized that it was precisely because of their unusualness that monsters were defined as being clear and distinguishable warnings.
It is important to take into consideration that during the Middle Ages a distinction was drawn between monstrous individuals and monstrous races or species, and that the members of these particular groups, who were first given a systematic classification by Pliny the Elder (23-79 ad), qualified as ‘monsters’ mainly as a consequence of their unusualness. They were monsters not so much because they were deformed, but because they were rare and extraordinary. From this point of view, a monster was a curiosity, a portent, an unusual sight.
The Renaissance saw the first serious attempt to bring the ambiguous nature of the word ‘monster’ to an end, and to bring the study of teratology within the scope of anatomical investigations. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on monsters the senses of ‘monster’ both as a divine or unnatural sign or omen, and as an unusual or curious phenomenon, were seriously challenged. According to Martin Weinrich, a German naturalist who wrote a treatise on monsters at the end of the sixteenth century, not every phenomenon that threatened the natural order could legitimately be called ‘a monster’. Teratology, on the other hand, could no longer be defined as a discourse related primarily to unusual events. It was suggested, by the French surgeon Jean Riolan and the Italian naturalist Ulysses Aldrovandi, that the new teratological science claimed to understand monstrosity exclusively in terms of physical deformity. By defining monsters as natural beings, it became possible to establish a classification of potential deformities based, for the first time, on anatomical criteria. But this new attitude towards the realm of monsters was not without its difficulties. First, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century anatomists, naturalists, and surgeons proposed so many different definitions of the word ‘monster’, on many occasions upon examination of a single and isolated case, that far too often there was no possibility of reaching a consensus about a ‘monstrous’ nature. Second, in order to separate the study of monsters from the popular imagery — still anchored during the Enlightenment in medieval and Renaissance sources — the enlightened teratologist understood that abnormalities had to be established as fact before any further investigation could legitimately take place. This lack of agreement in the definition of the term ‘monster’ helps to explain why the study of physical abnormalities was almost strictly confined to a collection of examples or instances during the eighteenth century. For example, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society between 1665 and 1780, there were over 100 communications regarding forms of ‘monstrosity’, and the French Academy of Sciences published another 130 papers on the subject between 1699 and 1770.
A transition from the understanding of monsters as beings ‘from outside’ to seeing them as ‘deviations from within’ led in the mid nineteenth century to teratology becoming a modern science, whose main concern was no longer the enquiry into the nature and origins of monsters but the study of major physical abnormalities or malformations in humans or animals. In fact, when the French naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire published his Traité de Teratologie — the first important milestone in the contemporary history of teratology — in 1832, he explicitly mentioned that this new teratological science should refrain from using the word ‘monster’ to describe its new object of study. From the mid nineteenth century, those who suffered from major or minor physical abnormalities, no matter how serious or unusual their condition, were no longer termed ‘monsters’ in scientific literature. However, many of these, like Siamese twins for example, were still referred to as ‘monsters’ in the ‘freak shows’ and circuses popular during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
— Javier Moscoso
See also congenital abnormalities; freaks.
