Contrary to common current assumption, modern right-to-die and "Baby Doe" debates are not unprecedented products of new life-saving technology. In 1915, Dr. Harry Haiselden, chief surgeon and president of German-American Hospital in Chicago, was the first Western physician to publicly permit the death of a potentially savable newborn. Dr. Haiselden's decision to take his case to the mass media ...

The chick embryo has a long history in investigations of vertebrate limb development because of the ease with which its limbs can be experimentally manipulated. Early studies elucidated the fundamental embryology of the limb and identified the key signalling regions that govern its development. The chick limb became a leading model for exploring the concept of positional information and underst...


 The purpose of this study is to analyze some peculiar aspects on the conception monsters and monstrous births in centuries preceding emergence modern teratology. A “new” discipline, a branch biology and, particular, comparative embryology, whose scientific basis was laid by studies Etienne Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, first half nineteenth century. At beginning I will show brief summa...

Since the initial observations over 25 years ago that alcohol (ethanol) is a human teratogen (Jones et al., ’73; Jones and Smith, ’73), concerns regarding the prenatal effects of alcohol as a significant public health problem have been raised throughout the world. Much effort has gone into the delineation of a physical and neurobehavioral phenotype, numerous studies have focused on the birth pr...