thumb|upright=1.2|Comprachicos, illustrated by Daniel Vierge Comprachicos are groups in European folklore who were said to physically cripple and deform children to work as beggars or living curiosities. The most common methods said to be used in this practice included stunting children's growth by physical restraint, muzzling their faces to deform them, slitting their eyes, dislocating their joints, and causing their bones to malform. The term, a compound Spanish neologism meaning "child-buyers", was coined by Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs, an 1869 novel which triggered moral panics over
thumb|upright=1.2|Comprachicos, illustrated by Daniel Vierge Comprachicos are groups in European folklore who were said to physically cripple and deform children to work as beggars or living curiosities. The most common methods said to be used in this practice included stunting children's growth by physical restraint, muzzling their faces to deform them, slitting their eyes, dislocating their joints, and causing their bones to malform. The term, a compound Spanish neologism meaning "child-buyers", was coined by Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs, an 1869 novel which triggered moral panics over supposed "cripple factories" across Europe. The words comprapequeños, cheylas and zaghles are also used. The resulting dwarfed and deformed adults made their living as mountebanks and freak show performers or were sold into bondage as pages, jesters, or court dwarfs.
==Historical references== One of the common creations of the comprachicos was supposed to be artificial dwarfs, formed "by anointing babies' spines with the grease of bats, moles and dormice" and using drugs such as "dwarf elder, knotgrass, and daisy juice". The conception was known to Shakespeare, as Beatrice K. Otto pointed out, quoting ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'': Get you gone, dwarf;You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).