ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Intestinal Worms and Caterpillars: The Precarious Equilibrium of Spontaneous Generation

• In Event: Reconsidering Spontaneous Generetation

English Abstract

In 2011, Harry Berger contended that leaf-devouring caterpillars in 17th-century Dutch still lifes were not allegories of vanity but unmediated depictions of nature’s violence. Yet the generative and ecological relations linking plants to caterpillars ran even deeper. Athanasius Kircher asserted that “Not a single plant fails to generate its own species of animal” after the botanist Francesco Corvini witnessed different species of caterpillars emerging from putrefying leaves of different species of plants–Kircher considered them to be the insects' “mothers.” Even following Francesco Redi’s 1668 refutation that spontaneous generation applies to insects, observers may have viewed still lifes as chilling portrayals of remorseless matricide, a deep but dark reflection on the interactions making up nature. Focusing on Girolamo Gabuccini’s 1547 work on intestinal worms, I address the dense and complicated patterns (destructive of kin and metaphorical “parent-offspring” relations) resulting from the belief in spontaneous generation. Gabuccini posited that nature purifies the environment by recycling decay into new life forms via spontaneous generation. He believed that insects outside the body and parasites within it perform analogous cleaning tasks by feeding on decaying matter; only as the latter becomes unavailable, he believed, do they turn to attacking living hosts. Just as the effects of parasites consuming the body manifest as disease, causing patients excruciating pain, Gabuccini viewed the silent and senseless plants being devoured by the caterpillars they previously generated as a form of disease writ large, targeting the environment rather than the body. My paper examines how the belief in spontaneous generation impacted early modern notions of what we might call ecological imbalance. Specifically, I ask: Who are the victims and the beneficiaries of spontaneous generation? And, What happens when nature’s essential self-cleaning process goes awry?

Author

• Javier Patiño Loira, University of California, Los Angeles