The human monster or 'freak,' a result of genetic deviance, has existed for as long as the species itself has. Ancient references to monstrosity occur in The Bible in 4 Ezra.5: "There shall be a confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstruous women shall bring forth monsters."

The best definition comes from Leslie Fiedler but Montaigne words and call for universal understanding are still actual.

"The true freak, however, stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy, since unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of human parents, however altered by forces we do not quite understand into something mythic and mysterious, as no mere cripple ever is. Passing either on the street, we may be simultaneously tempted to avert our eyes and to stare; but in the latter case we feel no threat to those desperately maintained boundaries on which any definition of sanity ultimately depends. On 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."

Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p.24.

Montaigne, "Of a Monstrous Child" (ed Donald M. Frame, p. 539):

On his own writings: "And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental.'

"What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it; and it is for us to believe that this figure that astonishes us is related and linked to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man."

Socrates’s speech in the Phaedrus (that he does not yet know himself and that he, therefore, has no leisure to examine alien things) is echoed and its meaning deepened in Montaigne’s wonder at himself:

 “I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become accustomed to anything strange by custom and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself”