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Updated: June 22, 2025
From the beginning of the second half of the last century to the present time may be termed the scientific epoch of teratology. We can almost with a certainty start this era with the names of Haller, Morgagni, Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, and Meckel, who adduced the explanations asked for by Harvey and Wolff.
All doubt was removed, and M. Isidore Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire was the mouth-piece of an immense majority of his colleagues, when he declared that the objections to the great antiquity of the human race had all melted away.
Probably the best example of this anomaly that we have was described by Galvagni at Cattania in 1834. This monster had two necks, on one of which was a single head normal in dimensions. On the other neck were two heads, as seen in the accompanying illustration. Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire mentions several cases, and Martin de Pedro publishes a description of a case in Madrid in 1879.
In a similar case, spoken of by Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the two organs were also separate, but urine and semen escaped sometimes from one, sometimes from both. The most celebrated of all the diphallic terata was Jean Baptista dos Santos, who when but six months old was spoken of by Acton. His father and mother were healthy and had two well-formed children.
The morbid, hypochondriac, the voluptuous, and the imbecile all found a place in Johnson's statistics; and although there are evidences of the possession of the generative function, still, we are compelled to say that the chances are against fecundity of human cryptorchids. In this connection might be quoted the curious case mentioned by Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, of a soldier who was hung for rape.
From the appearance of the treatise by Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, teratology has made enormous strides, and is to-day well on the road to becoming a science. Hand in hand with embryology it has been the subject of much investigation in this century, and to enumerate the workers of the present day who have helped to bring about scientific progress would be a task of many pages.
Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire presented to the Academie des Sciences in 1830 a child with four legs and feet who was in good health. Amman saw a girl with a large thigh attached to her nates. Below the thigh was a single leg made by the fusion of two legs. No patella was found and the knee was anchylosed.
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