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How do changing notions of beauty and ugliness affect attitudes toward physical deformities? To what extent was the birth of a dwarf, a giant or a hirsute child thought to reflect the depraved imagination of the mother and classify her child as a monster or freak of nature?
The Remarkables: Endocrine Abnormalities in Art addresses these questions and
others in the context of medical, social, intellectual and art history from antiquity to the twentieth century in Western Europe. Although neither artists nor physicians understood
the causes and manifestations of endocrine disease until the late nineteenth century,
the book’s examples document that artists were often the more astute observers of the
“human condition.”
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