Skip to main content

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.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Abstract: [Dis]Playing Changing Bodies: Metamorphic Greco-Roman Myths as ‘Display’ of Form

  [Dis]Playing Changing Bodies: Metamorphic Greco-Roman Myths as ‘Display’ of Form Dr Tanika Koosmen University of Newcastle, Australia. tanika.koosmen@newcastle.edu.au The historical narrative of displayed bodies in a variety of contexts – freak shows, museum display of human remains, even as far as drag shows – finds its philosophical origins in the traditions of Greco-Roman mythological metamorphosis. To display a body is to be aware of its physicality, its metaphorical makeup, and its human/nonhuman subjectivity. In the Greek and Latin myths of transformation, exemplified by 1 st century CE Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses , the display of the human and nonhuman form pre-empts the approach validated in later display traditions. When displaying a body that traverses the line between human and nonhuman, object and subject, these categorical violations must be considered: display of the metamorphosised form in literature is the early origins of these discussions, such as the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Call for Papers

An increasing amount of attention has been paid to impairment and disability in classical antiquity in recent years. However, one aspect of the subject that has not received significant attention, despite recent developments in the study of ancient paradoxography (e.g., Kazantzidis 2019; Geus 2018) and ancient collections, collectors, and collecting (e.g., Carpino et al. 2018; Higbie 2017; Thompson 2016; Gahtan and Pegazzano 2015; Rutledge 2012), is the public display of impaired and disabled people. The same applies to extraordinary (in all senses of the word) bodies. Whether those bodies were human, animal, or cryptid, when scholars have acknowledged this phenomenon, the focus has been placed squarely on those individuals responsible for the displaying. For example, the imperial biographer Suetonius uses this as an indicator of virtue or vice in his subjects: Augustus is a good emperor for avoiding bodily display while Tiberius and Domitian are bad emperors for indulging in the pr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Abstract: “The sort of man you all see me to be”: Visible Disability and Citizenship in Classical Athens

Jasmine Sahu-Hough  PhD candidate, Yale University   “The sort of man you all see me to be”: Visible Disability and Citizenship in Classical Athens   The dokimasia held annually to assess the eligibility of Athenian citizens for the so-called ‘disability pension’ would seem, in many ways, to be a classic example of the public display of disabled bodies. In requiring the recipients of the pension to submit to examination, the ancient Athenian democracy appears to prefigure modern states, which often subject those claiming disability benefits to intrusive surveillance – a process which, as Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker (2014) have argued, demotes disabled citizens to the status of “dependents”. Matthew Dillion (2017), however, has demonstrated that the dokimasia was simply a standard feature of democratic fiscal oversight; not only the pension beneficiaries (the adunatoi), but ...
Post a Comment
Read more