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Abstract: Babies in Bottles: Personhood, Pregnancy, and Anatomical Preparations, 1880–1900

Prof. Jessica M. Dandona

Babies in Bottles: Personhood, Pregnancy, and Anatomical Preparations, 1880–1900  

At the end of the 19th century, the legal status of the anatomical specimen was slowly evolving into its modern form. Not yet regulated by specific legislation, specimens were the subject of rampant commodification and were exhibited, collected, traded, bought, and sold, internationally as well as locally. No meeting of an anatomical society was complete without their exposition—and no anatomical museum complete without their display. Focusing upon the exhibition of fetal remains, this paper demonstrates how the study of anatomical specimens mediated between the well-established, if still controversial, practice of dissection and an increasing emphasis on the visual as a privileged mode of encountering and describing the biomedical body. Through a consideration of the display of fetal bodies in both professional and popular contexts, including close analysis of 19th-century collections in Paris, Glasgow, and Philadelphia, this paper traces the shifting meanings, value, and significance attributed to anatomical preparations in this era. Linking fetal specimens to the medicalization of pregnancy, contemporary discoveries in embryology, and debates around abortion, I will argue that the emerging concept of fetal personhood challenged and inflected the ways in which specimens were understood, highlighting their hybrid—and thus “extraordinary”—quality as at once potential human subject and the object of knowledge. At a time when non-invasive, visual access to the interior of the pregnant body was not yet possible, moreover, the study and display of such specimens allowed both popular audiences and medical professionals to study the conditions, processes, and events that gave rise to fetal death and deformity. The fetal specimen thus functioned as an “extraordinary body” both in its paradoxical (in)visibility and through its role in marking, in the words of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “the borders between the normal and the pathological.”

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