This title reveals the history of the herring and those whose lives have revolved around its taking and getting it to the tables of the masses.

Presents tales from across the folklore of the animal kingdom: a learned pig more admired than Sir Isaac Newton by the English public, an elephant that Lord Byron wanted to employ as his butler, and a dancing horse whose skills in mathematics were praised by William Shakespeare. This book tells ten stories of beliefs and Ripley-like facts.

The story of the lives of individuals afflicted with severe deformities and how seventeenth and eighteenth-century British society reacted to their extraordinary bodies.

The hunt for an 18th-century sexual psychopath that created one of the first media celebrities.

Before museums there were cabinets of medical curiosities: a dried mermaid might sit next to a giant's shinbone; the skeletons of conjoined twins beside an Egyptian mummy. The author uses his medical expertise to explore some of these medical freaks, outright frauds and popular myths.

Jan Bondeson M.D. focuses his medical expertise on the great unsolved mysteries of disputed identity of the last two hundred years.

Terror on the Streets in 1790. Between 1788 and 1790 a series of street assaults on women were perpetrated by a mysterious person whom the press quickly dubbed The Monster. A young Welshman, Rhynwick Williams, was found guilty of the attacks after two ludicrous trials. Jan Bondeson reassesses the evidence for his guilt while vividly depicting London at the end of the eighteenth century.

A research physician whose specialties are rheumatology and internal medicine, Bondeson indulges his (and our) fascination with natural anomalies by presenting his findings concerning such historical scientific curiosities as the dragon-like basilisk, Jumbo the king of elephants, the raining down of fish and frogs, the vegetable lamb, and the

This book tells ten fascinating stories of myths, hoaxes, and beliefs concerning the animal kingdom.