The first documented use of the word teratology was the title of a 1678 discourse of prodigies and wonders (OED, 1989). Taken from the Greek root, τέρασ, meaning prodigy, portent, omen, or wonder (Bauer, 1957, 1979), the original connotation in Homer and in the New Testament was of divine communication: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe” (John 4:48). The word did not acquire its connotation of deformed or monstrous until the mid-nineteenth century, when it first appeared in 1842 in a dictionary of scientific terms indicating the study of monsters or anomalies. Shortly thereafter, the term teratogenesis appeared in Robley Dunglison's fifteenth edition of a medical lexicon to indicate the study of deformities in the organization in plants and animals. Nineteenth-century physicians and scientists were well schooled in the Attic Greek of Homer and likely would have known that for the Greeks, deformities in infants were taken as a sign of divine warning, displeasure, or retribution. Moreover, that monstrous births were portents of displeasure and disaster also influenced European thinking. During the Middle Ages, births of malformed infants were significant events thought to predict catastrophes and “signs of punishment at hand” (Pare's Chyrugery, 1579, quoted in Warkany, 1977). Hence, in their choice of the root τέρασ, nineteenth-century physicians brought together the notion of portent with the emphasis on monstrosity and horror to the study of unexpected and poorly understood malformations.