Temporalizing pregnancy
Soemmerring’s representation of embryonic development was made possible by important longer-term transformations that began in the late 1600s.
Humans were no longer seen as an exception in nature. Legal medical experts, drawing on humoralism, argued that pregnancy lasted no longer in the horse (hot) than in the donkey (cold). Nature was efficient: if it could, occasionally, complete the production of a healthy human being in five months, then why should it, in most cases, take nine? Why were children born at nine months healthier than those delivered earlier or later? The ‘viability’ of the newborn child was increasingly understood not as ability to survive but as maturity, manifest in the perfect external form. Immature children had too wide or still closed openings, flawed nails and failed to cry at birth.
This opened a space for imagining the progress of the embryo not just as an increase in size but also as a change in form. Pregnancy came to be seen as a developmental process of fixed duration. Its stages and healthy progress were evaluated by clinical examination. This reframing of both embryonic development and pregnancy was based in the broader ‘temporalization’ of European culture that, in the decades around 1800, resulted in newly historical approaches to nature and society.
A non-developmental series of models from Florence, early 1800s |
Drawings of the stages of pregnancy to guide clinical examination, 1822 |
