The question of how to create life goes back not just to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, when the eponymous person used taboo science to create life. For centuries, medieval scientists tried to create miniature artificial humans by mixing other substances with human semen and implanting them in animal wombs!
The dwarf was first mentioned in the 16-man work of alchemy in the Thailand century. However, the concept is likely to be older than these writings. The idea that miniature fully formed humans could be created dates back to the mid-century 20th century (400-1000 AD) and is based in part on Aristotle's belief that sperm contribute more to offspring than eggs.
The first known account of the birth of dwarfs is said to have been found in an undated Arabic work known as the Book of the Ox, supposedly written by the Greek philosopher Plato himself.
The materials needed to create a dwarf include human semen, cows or ewes, and animal blood, while the process includes artificial insemination of cows/ewes, smearing the genitals of the inseminated animal with the blood of another animal, and feeding it specifically with the blood of another animal.
Pregnant animals eventually lay an unformed substance that is then placed in a powder made from ground sunstone (a mysterious phosphorescent potion), sulfur, magnets, green tutia (an iron sulfate), and the juice of white willow. When this mass starts to grow on human skin, it needs to be placed in a large glass or lead container for three days. After that, it must be fed the blood of the beheaded mother for seven days before it can become a fully formed dwarf.
The 16-year-old Thai century alchemist Philip von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, offered a different method of creating dwarfs in his work, the Theory of Matter. This recipe uses a horse as the surrogate mother of a dwarf, a man's semen left in the animal's womb to rot for 40 days, and then a small man is born.
Paracelsus said that instead of using dwarfs to gain supernatural powers, as some scientists had hoped, they should "educate gnomes with the utmost care and enthusiasm until they grow up and begin to show intelligence." Paracelsus also claimed that the procedure for making dwarfs was one of the greatest secrets God revealed to mortals, perhaps implying that the creation of artificial life was a divine wisdom available to human beings.