Making Monsters: The Maternal Body as an Environment in Eighteenth-Century Embryology

• In Event: ‘I Contain Multitudes’: Materials of Making Worlds.

Abstract

One of the most encompassing projects for eighteenth-century anatomists was unravelling the mysterious, hidden processes of human generation. They used anatomical preparations, microscopes, Biblical text, and countless chicken eggs to observe the process through which an embryo changed during gestation. Yet anatomists of this century were divided: some believed the evidence showed that God had created all beings fully and perfectly at Creation and nested the generations inside one another, making gestation a simple growth process; others believed the evidence showed the body emerging seemingly out of nothingness into an organized, coherent body. The stakes of this disagreement were high, with implications for God’s omnipotent power, the agency of nature, and human exceptionalism.

Also implicated: mothers, as creators of fetal bodies. This paper uses cases of “monstrous births” to interrogate the various ways in which the womb was conceptualized as an environment by eighteenth-century embryologists. If the debate over growth versus development held implications about nature broadly-writ, then abnormal births placed women and their wombs in the philosophical crosshairs as embryologists sought to understood how the maternal body facilitated-- and sometimes thwarted-- the unseen powerful forces of God and nature. I examine how the specific abnormalities of monstrous birth cases allowed anatomists to imagine the maternal body as an environment subjected to the influences of imagination, illness, injury, and emotion. The two embryological philosophies, I argue, produced distinct scientific beliefs about the creative environment of the maternal body and its capability of, and responsibility for, creating monsters.

Author

• Sara Ray, University of Pennsylvania