Freaks in contemporary culture are largely recognized as medical anomalies, or disfigurements. In these images we see how some of the first freaks were later diagnosed. This family of dwarves were not relegated to a life of sideshow preformers, they were understood to be humans with a birth defect, specifically here they are studied for the medical reasons their hands do not look like everyone else's. Their freaksih affliction is now known as a digital malformation, meaning the digits on thier hands formed incorrectly from genetics, not from any mystical freak story.
