Health writer and How-to blogger Molly Edmonds today was talking to me about people who are carrying their own twin and don’t know it (be sure to look for the article soon), so I was excited to see an article in New Scientist about a possible case of fetus in fitu, or parasitic twins.

Queen Maria Theresa was confronted in 1678 with a fetus said to be 23 years old. Being a rather scientifically curious woman and acquainted with stories of stone babies found in dead women’s dissected wombs, she had her surgeon, Pierre Dionis, investigate the claim.

But this isn’t just about my health interests — the fetus in question was part of someone’s cabinet of curiosities.

The cabinet of curiosities was in vogue in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it was like a museum of oddities. You might find part of a mermaid, a stuffed bird and an exotic weapon jumbled together in a display. Some things (like the mermaid, for example) weren’t real, but many of the objects were interesting antomical, natural or cultural specimens. The wunderkammern might literally be a cabinet, or it might be an entire room.

When Josh Clark wrote about Peter the Great’s wunderkammern, we discussed the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which is like a modern-day wunderkammern. I’d just written about FOP, a disease that turns your muscles and connective tissue to bone, and the museum houses FOP skeletons, along with shrunken heads and the Soap Lady.

What would be in your cabinet of curiosities? (If you want to see some creepy-cool anatomy pictures, click on this gallery from New Scientist.)

More grisly history:

How did Rasputin really die?
Who was the real Count Dracula?
Was a Hungarian countess the world’s first serial killer?