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* Fetiform teratoma (homunculus) is a term that has been given to a rare form of ovarian teratoma that resembles a malformed fetus. There are very few reported cases of this entity in the English language literature. In this report, we document a case of fetiform teratoma in a 23-year-old woman, gravida 0, who initially presented with a chief complaint of dyspareunia. The clinical and pathologic aspects of this rare entity are presented here, with a review of the English literature. Differentiating fetiform teratoma from the more highly developed fetus-in-fetu and ectopic pregnancy is also discussed.
(Arch Pathol Lab Med. 2006;130:1552-1556)
The concept of a homunculus (Latin for ''little man,'' sometimes spelled ''homonculus'') is often used to illustrate the functioning of a system. In the scientific sense of an unknowable prime actor, it can be viewed as an entity or agent.
The term appears to have been first used by the alchemist Paracelsus. He once claimed that he had created a false human being that he referred to as the homunculus. The creature was to have stood no more than 12 inches tall and did the work usually associated with a golem (in Jewish folklore, a golem [sometimes pronounced goilem] is an animated being crafted from inanimate material; the name appears to derive from the word gelem, which means ''raw material''). However, after a short time, the homunculus turned on its creator and ran away. The recipe consisted of a bag of bones, sperm, skin fragments, and hair from any animal of which the homunculus would be a hybrid. This was to be laid in the ground surrounded by horse manure for 40 days, at which point the embryo would form.1
The Greeks, including Hippocrates, pondered heredity. They devised a theory of ''pangenesis,'' which claimed that sex involved the transfer of miniaturized body parts: ''Hairs, nails, veins, arteries, tendons and their bones, albeit invisible as their particles are so small. While growing, they gradually separate from each other.'' This idea enjoyed a brief renaissance when Charles Darwin, desperate to support his theory of evolution by natural selection with a viable hypothesis of inheritance, put forward a modified version of pangenesis in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Darwin's scheme, each organ-eyes, kidneys,...