The Huth Collection, a series of Elizabethan illustrative ballads housed in the British Museum, depicts marvels of nature including monstrous births. As such, it represents a unique corpus of evidence for congenital conditions and palaeopathology. It has been possible to diagnose abnormalities and syndromes which until now, based on skeletal material, have not been recognized in earlier British societies. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.