Yang Youcheng, a doctor of Jiankang, said he had witnessed three things with his own eyes, all monstrous births by women.
The wife of Wang, the master of a travellers’ lodge at Tonglin Bay, was twenty-nine. In the eighth month of the third year of the Shaoxing reign she was pregnant, and at the birth produced five or six great snakes on the grass. The midwife and her husband fled in terror, and the snakes went straight out to the water of the Qinhuai. At night they came back into the house to see their mother and drink milk, and at dawn left. Everyone living in the lodge moved away to other houses, and after seven days they were gone for good.
The wife of the salt merchant Liu Yi, when about to give birth, could not deliver, and her strength was failing and she was dying. Yang was called to feel her pulse and said: “There is certainly something strange in the belly. It is best to save the mother.” He gave her medicine and poured it down, and at midnight she gave birth to a child with a very large head, with thick hair five inches long, two lumps of flesh rising like horns on its crown, and more than ten teeth in its mouth, white and saw-toothed. The family killed it and threw it in the river.
Also, the wife of Big Brother Zhang of the river bend at Doumen Bridge gave birth to a cock. Her husband took a knife and was still cutting it up when the woman again said her belly hurt, and gave birth to a monkey, which was also killed, wrapped in cloth, sewn into a great stone, lifted and thrown into a deep pool.
The three mothers were fortunately unharmed, and the cause of the monstrosity could not be guessed.
