Editor—In 1735 Johanna Sophia Schmied, from the village of Taucha near Leipzig, gave birth to a stillborn child with multiple abnormalities, described at the time as a “very rare” monster. The case was reported by a local physician, Gottlieb Friderici, in a tract, Monstrum humanum rarissimum, published in Leipzig two years later.1Friderici performed a necropsy and published his findings along with a case history of the pregnancy and two detailed plates engraved by a local draughtsman “from life”. The mother was aged 28 years, of short stature and slender, with a “choleric-melancholic” temperament. She had been married to a “hunchback” for 10 years, and they had three other children, all “free of imperfections”; the fourth child is that described by Friderici. “Halfway” though the pregnancy, the fetal movements were felt very faintly and the uterus was not thereafter seen to increase in size, whereas her husband recalled that in the previous pregnancies her belly had grown normally. The baby was stillborn after a labour of seven hours.

A large anterior encephalocele was present. Friderici remarked that, although the appearance resembled hydrocephalus, the protuberance contained cerebral matter. The frontal bone was very abnormal to the bridge of the nose. The nose was “vestigial”, but the nostrils were patent, and a probe inserted into the oral cavity passed through a fissure …