by Debbie Felton
A recent trip to the Medicinsk Museion (Medical Museum) in Copenhagen, Denmark reminded me that the names for many medical conditions have been inspired by classical mythology, including some ancient monsters.
The following post covers two of these conditions and contains images that may be disturbing for some readers.
From the Greek word τέρας (teras), which originally indicated a portent from the gods and came to mean “marvel of nature” or “monster,” comes the English “teratology.” In the humanities, the term refers to the study of monsters and other fantastical creatures. But in biology, “teratology” constitutes a sub-field of medical genetics: the study of abnormalities in physiological development. Several congenital birth defects are named for mythological monsters. Today, we’re focusing on two specific genetic abnormalities, one named for the Sirens and another for the Cyclops.
Sirenomelia
From the Greek seirēn (σειρήν) and melos (μέλος), meaning “limb,” sirenomelia—also known as “mermaid syndrome”— is a birth defect in which the child’s lower limbs are fused together, resulting in what looks like a mermaid’s tail. The causes of this condition remain uncertain, and, despite the name, it doesn’t involve just the legs; sirenomelia also often affects the lower spine, pelvic bone, and kidneys as well, including related blood vessels. The deformation is so severe that sirenomelia is usually (but not always) fatal for the child, but fortunately rare, occurring in perhaps 1 of 100,000 births.
Newborns with “mermaid syndrome,” characterized by fused, only partially developed legs and genitalia. Medical Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark. (The Danish term, havfruesyndrom, comes from havfrue, “sea-lady, i.e., “mer-maid.”) Photo by the author.
The earliest literature to mention the Sirens, Homer’s Odyssey, doesn’t describe them physically, but makes clear they live on an island, not in the sea—so they were hardly what we would consider mermaids. Their association with the sea came about from their actions: their enchanting voices intentionally lured sailors to their doom. The Sirens sit in a meadow, surrounded by the rotting corpses of shipwrecked sailors who, under the spell of the Sirens’ singing, neglected to steer their ships away from the rocky coast. We don’t know the Sirens’ origins or their motivation for seducing sailors with their songs; possibly these mysterious beings were an early metaphor for the dangers of seafaring or, more specifically, of being mesmerized by the sea with its rolling waves and calming sounds and consequently forgetting to keep an eye out for dangers such as rocky shores.
But starting in Greek art of the sixth century BCE and later, the Odyssean Sirens were represented as half-woman and half-bird (possibly via some conflation with the Harpies). Descriptions of the Sirens as “winged” started creeping into literature as well, and by third century BCE Greek literature referred to the Sirens as half-human woman, half-avian. This bird-woman hybrid continued in medieval literature. So, at what point did the Sirens gain fish attributes?
This seems to have occurred in medieval bestiaries. By this point the Odyssean Sirens had become more of a generic type of female hybrid monster. Along with bird-women sirens, medieval bestiaries started to include sirens as fish-woman composites, with the first written mention of this appearing in the late seventh-/early eighth-century CE Liber Monstrorum (Book of Monsters). The reasons for this new version of the siren aren’t clear; possibly there was some conflation with Scylla, another of the sea-related monsters Odysseus encountered, or possibly the concept of the Greek sirens merged with that of female sea nymphs of Scandinavian folklore. Whatever the cause, from that point on fish-tailed sirens continued to be depicted with about as much regularity as the bird-like versions.
Siren from Bestiary Harley MS 3244, ff 36r-71v. 13th century CE.
#/media/File:Siren_3244.jpg){kind=link}
Cyclopia
Like the Sirens, the Cyclopes were among the many monsters Odysseus encountered during his journey back from the Trojan War. Their distinguishing characteristic, apart from their large size, was the single eye in the middle of their forehead, as evident in the origin of their name: Greek κύκλωψ, “circle-eye.” Like sirenomelia, cyclopia is a very rare congenital disorder—in this case, even more rare—and with unknown causes. Unlike sirenomelia, cyclopia is always fatal, resulting in death in the womb or in a stillbirth because the brain, among other body parts, does not develop normally in the fetus and can’t sustain the body’s functions. Basically, the forebrain fails to develop into two separate hemispheres (which is where we get cyclopia’s technical name, alobar holoprosencephaly).
Newborns with cyclopia. Medical Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo by the author.
The most obvious external sign of cyclopia is the facial abnormality, which results from the eye orbits not properly dividing into two distinct cavities. The nose is also missing or deformed, and sometimes the ears as well. The maximum survival rate for a newborn with cyclopia has been less than a day.
Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024), to which she contributed the chapter “Ancient Monsters in Modern Science.” She also regularly teaches a course on the Greek and Latin roots of medical terminology.