Thompson (1968, 30-31), “but they were removed by order of the authorities, as it was considered at the time that such abnormal creatures presaged evil.”
In later circuses and carnivals, such human oddities were termed freaks (as in freaks of nature) and were exhibited in what were typically called freak shows. Fiedler (1993, 23-24) observed that, beyond the merely dis- abled, “[o]nly the true freak challenges the conventional boundaries between male and female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and other, and consequently between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth.”
Whatever their era, examples of human monstrosities include midgets and dwarfs at one end of the size spectrum and giants at the other. (These will be discussed in chapters 2 and 3, respectively.) Other examples are conjoined twins (like those already described), hirsute people (especially those entirely covered with long hair), and certain others regarded as human-animal hybrids (see part 5).
Of course, there have been exaggerated descriptions of monstrosities, many occurring over time due to processes well known to folklorists. Moreover, those fantastic creatures represented in monster books were often “repetitions, depicted with greater freedom of imagination, of those described in earlier times” (Thompson 1968, 30).