On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  23. For example, a few days after the effusive Philadelphia Public Ledger story, the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times decried the Mermaid as a hoax and lambasted the Ledger for being suckered. But at the same time, the New York Tribune wrote:

  That Mermaid. Has arrived in this city on its way to the British Museum, and we were yesterday gratified with a private view of it. We tried hard to determine where or how some cute Yankee had joined a monkey’s head to a fish’s body, but had to give it up, though our incredulity still lingers. If such an animal ever did exist, it is surely the most extraordinary fact in Natural History. Believe it we can hardly; but how to account otherwise for what our eyes have seen staggers us. We should like to hear the opinion of better judges, after a rigid scrutiny.

  See gallery 4, Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader.

  24. A. H. Saxon, ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum (Columbia University Press, 1983), letter 8.

  25. Ibid., letter 24.

  26. Gallery 2, Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader.

  27. For an interesting discussion of Barnum’s views on slavery and the “What Is It?” display, see Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave (Harvard University Press, 2001).

  28. See Marc Hartzman, American Sideshow (Tarcher, 2006), part II.

  CHAPTER 10

  1. This pamphlet was found in the Newberry Library, Chicago, collected under the title Reprints of English Books, 1475–1700, edited by Foster. “Relation of a Terrible Monster called a Toad-fish” is found in file number 37 of the collection. I’ve taken the liberty of modernizing the spellings and grammar for the sake of readability.

  2. See Katherine Park and Lorraine J. Daston’s important and influential article “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century France and England,” Past and Present, no. 92 (1981).

  3. See Wittkower, “Marvels of the East.”

  4. Reprints of English Books, 1475–1700, edited by Foster, file 34.

  5. Sadler’s text is included as an excerpt in the appendix of Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, translated by Janis L. Pallister (University of Chicago Press, 1983). All quotations of Paré are from Pallister’s translation.

  6. Jean Ceard, La Nature et lesprodigies (Droz, 1977; 2nd ed., 1996) has been decisive in shaping our understanding of Paré’s naturalism.

  7. Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, chapter 29.

  8. See ibid., chapter 33 for Paré’s reductionist materialist argument.

  9. See ibid., chapter 20.

  10. See ibid., preface.

  11. He offers an illustrated tour of conjoined twins, parasitic anomalies, and hermaphrodites, all of which are explained by the presence of too much seed at the time of generation. “On the generating of monsters,” Paré explains, “Hippocrates says that if there is too great an abundance of matter, multiple births will occur, or else a monstrous child having superfluous and useless parts, such as two heads, four arms, four legs, six digits on the hands and feet, or other things.”

  12. Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, chapter 1.

  13. See ibid., chapter 9 for a discussion of the role of the imagination.

  14. The Chinese also have a long tradition, still alive in rural areas, of monsters being produced by disturbing maternal perceptions and imaginings. For an interesting discussion of the relevant Qin Dynasty texts, see Frank Dikotter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (Columbia University Press, 1998), “Torments of Imagination,” chapter 2.

  15. Galileo’s letter to the grand duchess is his most famous articulation of the relationship between science and religion. He ties his humanism to a theological tether: “But I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.”

  16. Descartes followed the important work of his British contemporary William Harvey (1578–1657), who first accurately described the circulatory system, using a mechanical paradigm. In his later studies Harvey became very interested in embryology, arguing for epigenesis over preformationism and even postulating the existence of a mammalian ovum.

  17. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, translated by Lawrence J. Lafleur (Prentice Hall, 1960), part V.

  18. It seems a significant testament to the difference between Descartes’ age and our own that he assumes a familiarity on the part of his readers with freshly decapitated heads (and also assumes easy access to large animal hearts).

  19. For an interesting interpretation of the change in La Mettrie’s thinking from earlier to later writings, see Blair Campbell, “La Mettrie: The Robot and the Automaton,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 4 (1970).

  20. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine, translated by Gertrude Carman Bussey (Open Court, 1999).

  21. As if he hadn’t dealt enough blows to the egos of his readers, La Mettrie says that even smart people are not uniquely different from imbeciles. Idiots and insane people have brains, he says, but they are mechanically deficient or the tissues are “too soft.” Change a tiny fiber in the brain machine, he suggests, and you could change Erasmus or Fontenelle into idiots.

  22. Dr. Darwin is mentioned briefly in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s introduction to the original 1818 edition of Frankenstein.

  23. Frankenstein, vol. 1, chapter 4.

  24. See Marilyn Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science,” in the Modern Criticism section of Norton’s Critical Edition of Frankenstein, edited by J. Paul Hunter (1996). Butler points out that the earliest versions of Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein show him as a scientific bumbler who knows “too little science rather than too much.” The earliest versions of the story are not indictments of science itself.

  25. Thomas Pynchon, in his essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review, October 1984, underscores the traditional Romantic interpretation of Frankenstein by connecting Shelley, via her husband and Lord Byron, to Luddite antitechnology sympathies of the day.

  26. One of the reasons for the now common interpretation that the monster has more humanity than his maker can be found in the fact that Frankenstein reads Paracelsus, Agrippa, and other “dubious” sources, while the monster educates himself on Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch.

  27. Isaiah Berlin quotes this in The Crooked Timber of Humanity.

  28. See Steven Marcus, “Frankenstein: Myths of Scientific and Medical Knowledge and Stories of Human Relations,” Southern Review 38, no. 1 (2002) for a nice summary of the many ways “Frankenstein” has been employed as a cultural adjective.

  29. Although Shelley never met Hunter—he died a few years before she was born—she certainly knew of him. Hunter had trained the physician Anthony Carlisle, who presided over Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, while she lay dying (shortly after giving birth to Mary Shelley). John Hunter, who started from quite humble Scottish beginnings, eventually became surgeon to King George III, and after Hunter’s death his astounding anatomy and physiology collection became the pride of the Royal College of Surgeons. Hunter and his collection inspired a posthumous yearly lecture series that brought renown and controversy to the Royal College of Surgeons, including the lectures of Shelley’s friend William Lawrence.

  30. For a description of Hunter’s eccentric experiments and specimens, especially as they relate to museology, see Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. Also see Wendy Moore’s biography The Knife Man (Broadway Books, 2005).

  31. In his 1837 Hunterian Lectures, Richard Owen described Hunter’s contribution:

  With respect to Monstrosities in general, Hunter had drawn out a scheme for their classification, and had produced them by experiment. In the Animal Economy he states that every Species of Animal, and every part of an animal body is subject to malformation,
but that this is not a freak of Nature, or a matter of mere chance;—for he observes that every species has a disposition to deviate from Nature in a manner peculiar to itself. It is this principle that forms the basis of the latest and most elaborate Treatise on Monsters, a Work, which Geoffroy St. Hilaire describes as being “the result of having established, by great number of researches, that Monsters are, like the Beings called Normal, subject to Constant rules.”

  My quotes from Owen’s lectures are taken from Philip Reid Sloan’s excellent edition of The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy, May and June 1837 (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  32. Ibid., lecture 4, notes section. Karl Ernst Von Baer (1792–1876) seemingly refuted this “law of parallelism” when he demonstrated that “the embryo of a higher animal form never resembles the adult of any other animal form, but only its embryo.” Von Baer saw this refutation, erroneously, as a derailment of evolutionism. But in the 1880s Frank Balfour asked a nagging question that resisted Von Baer’s generalization: “[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace?” The philosopher Ron Amundson clarifies: “Hypothetical ancestors can be used to explain gill arches and notochords in mammalian embryos. Von Baer’s laws cannot.” For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Amundson’s The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2005). The quotes from Von Baer and Balfour are from Amundson’s chapters 3 and 5, respectively.

  33. For a provocative earlier theory that combined preformation ideas with evolution, see Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646–1716) idiosyncratic “Monadology.” In section 74 he writes:

  Philosophers formerly have been very perplexed concerning the origin of forms, entelechies, or souls. Today, however, it has been discovered through precise observations made on plants, insects, and animals that the organized bodies of nature are never produced out of chaos or putrefaction, but always out of seeds, in which doubtless there has been some preformation. Hence it has been concluded, not only that the organized body was already in the seed before conception, but also that there was a soul in this body, and, in short, the animal itself.

  34. Owen, Hunterian Lectures, lecture 4.

  35. Apparently Hunter was the first British scientist to observe and describe the egg-tooth that grows on fetal chicken beaks (the Italian Aldrovandi had actually seen it long before). The “little horny knob at the end of the beak” enables chicks to crack out of their shells. See Descriptive Catalogue of the Physiological Series in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (E. & S. Livingstone, 1971), vol. 2.

  36. Owen, Hunterian Lectures, lecture 4.

  37. The cyclops is better understood as a fusion of two eyes. William Lawrence’s entry on “Monsters” in Abraham Reece’s Cyclopedia anatomized cyclops faces and repeatedly found two optic nerves joined together. “Indeed, in all the instances there have been more or less plain marks of the apparently single organ being composed of the parts of two eyes.” This insight probably predates, just barely, Geoffroy’s soi pour soi explanation of cyclops formation, but the important point is that such mechanical lawful explanations had begun to dominate the discussion of monsters.

  38. See Armand Marie LeRoi, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body (Viking, 2003), chapter 2.

  39. William Lawrence, “Monster,” in Cyclopedia, compiled by Abraham Rees (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819), vol. 24. All references to the Cyclopedia are drawn from an unpaginated original text in the Newberry Library, Chicago.

  40. Lawrence begins his encyclopedia entry with a definition: “Monster, in Anatomy and Physiology, a creature in whom the body in general, or some large and conspicuous part of it, deviates remarkably from the accustomed formation. The union of the two eyes into one, with deficiency of the nose, the want of the brain, and of its membranous and bony coverings, the various more or less complete junctions of two bodies, &c. come under this description. A considerable deviation from the ordinary form or structure of a particular part or organ is often called a monstrous formation.”

  41. Lawrence tells a miserable story:

  In one case, where the bones were wanting, but an imperfect cerebrum seemed to exist, the child lived six days. The child was perfectly formed, excepting the head, and of usual size. It took no food and had no evacuation. Respiration went on naturally: it did not cry, but often made a hideous whining noise. When the soft substance at the top of the head was touched, general and violent convulsions took place. No signs of voluntary motions appeared, and the mother had less feeling of the child in utero, than in her former pregnancy.

  42. Here he adds a short addendum to his point, one that must have seemed obvious to his 1819 peers but that would soon prove highly contentious for Darwin’s generation. Lawrence says that nature could certainly make many possible extreme variations that would live and flourish rather than perish quickly, “but this would interfere with another principle, which seems to prevail extensively in the operations of nature— preservation of uniformity in the species.”

  43. “How does it happen,” he asks, “that the head should be destroyed in all cases just so far as the orbits?” These and other such arguments refine Lawrence’s belief that internal fusions might arise in utero, causing such monsters as conjoined twins or parasite or autosite twins, but sudden external force does not appear to create monsters.

  44. Here Lawrence takes the high ground against teleologists like Haller, but his own ground is not quite as high as he thinks, since he’s just given a similarly speculative argument about monster variations being held in check by nature’s interest in preserving “uniformity in the species.” Von Haller supported his idea that violence damaged the acephalic (headless) children by saying that it was contrary to the wisdom of nature to create arteries, veins, and nerves in a skull that was destined to be brainless. “This is a dangerous argument,” Lawrence countered. “Is it not equally contradictory that a rectum should be formed without an anus, since life cannot be continued without such an opening? If nature be so wise and careful, why did she not provide against the destruction of the head? And why does she go on working, month after month, to no purpose, in constructing the numerous other monsters, which are incapable of life?”

  45. Our current scientific understanding of teratology is still in its infancy. Roughly speaking, we know that 25 percent of anomalous births are attributable to known genetic and chromosomal factors (e.g., fragile X syndrome, Huntington’s disease, Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis), and 10 percent are attributable to environmental factors (e.g., chemical teratogens, virus infections, radiation), leaving 65 percent to unknown causes. We now know that most (90 percent) malformed fetuses are spontaneously aborted before birth (compared with only 18 percent of phenotypi-cally normal conceptuses). Those anomalous humans who survive to birth make up between 2 and 7 percent of total human births.

  CHAPTER 11

  1. See Evelleen Richard’s discussion of Robert Knox in “A Political Anatomy of Monsters, Hopeful and Otherwise,” Isis 85 (1994).

  2. This makes more sense when we remember that no one at this time knew what a proper “gene” was. We, on the other side of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, think of the “germ” in purely material chemical terms, but in the 1830s there was more conceptual room to imagine teleological forces at work in the mysterious unit of heredity. Owen argued for a teleo-directed monsterology of preset saltations. The historian Evelleen Richards explains, “By appropriating Hunter’s endogenous explanation of teratological change, and the evidence Hunter adduced in its support, Owen was able to oppose Geoffroy’s materialistic emphasis on external causation and to validate his own teleomechanism of divinely preprogrammed evolutionary change in the embryo.” See Richards’s “A Political Anatomy of Monsters.”

  3. In 1838 Darwin filled his re
d Notebook D with a summary and gloss of John Hunter’s book Animal Economy. Darwin’s new friend Richard Owen was editing Hunter’s work and also lecturing on it at this time, so one finds a mishmash of Hunter’s and Owen’s ideas about monsters in Notebook D. Darwin focused his musings on the issue of reproduction and whether it had importance for species transmutation.

  4. Despite their disagreements, the teratologists still learned much from each other’s research. Owen even quotes, approvingly, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s claim that his father had risen above previous theorists: “It was from precisely opposing principles that my father took as his point of departure; and it was also, as it must be, to precisely opposing results that he arrived. Establishing, through a great number of investigations, that monsters are, like those beings said to be normal, subordinated to constant laws, he was led to admit that the method of classification that naturalists employed for the latter, might be applied with success to the former.” Thanks to my colleague Kate Hamerton for improving my translation of the French. The passage is taken from the section of Owen’s notes, found in Paul H. Barrett et al.’s edition of Notebook D in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks 1836–1844 (British Museum and Cornell University Press, 1987). All references to Darwin’s Notebooks are from Barrett’s edition.