I’ve just had a first chance to look round the new exhibition at Cambridge University Library, entitled ‘Books and Babies: Communicating Reproduction’. A spin-off from a Wellcome-funded project entitled ‘Generation to Reproduction’, the exhibition packs several thousand years of human thinking about human replication into a single room.
We’re greeted by a stomach-churning image from William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), in which the sensitively-rendered, soft-fleshed foetus nestles in the clinically-carved meat of a dissected female pelvis. Representations of the womb, and battles for control of the female body, remain prominent in what follows. Display cabinets offer us snapshots of the history of midwifery, evolutionary and eugenic thinking, theories of population explosion and practices of birth-control, the abortion debate, the development of ‘test-tube babies’… I was sorry not to see some space given to once-commonplace theories of spontaneous generation (the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog, or serpents out of the Nile mud), but there is at least a medieval bestiary to illustrate the question of whether weasels conceive through the mouth and give birth through the ear or vice versa.
It’s not all books–there are also letters, newspapers, comics, scratched scientific notes, DVD-boxes, small fertility statues, and several condoms and pregnancy testing-kits. But the exhibition does raise interesting questions about the role that different media have played in disseminating ideas. At several points it made me scared about the power that print has had to lay claim to objectivity and to influence thought. The density of a scientific illustration, such as that in the 1934 Gesetz zur Verhütung… (a commentary on the Nazi sterilization programme); or the simplicity of a graph from 1916 showing the disparity between falling birth-rates in upper- and middle-class Hampstead as contrasted with stable rates in working-class Shoreditch; or the photographic feats of a Cesare Lombroso, inventing the discipline of criminal anthropology by juxtaposing scores of heads of ‘delinquent man’ in 1889–these remnants of bygone pseudo-science send shivers down the spine.
The shivers are somewhat allayed by the case devoted to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a cobbled-together book promising to disclose the secrets of sex and childbirth, which was a furtively-thumbed classic from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Here the curators pause to think about individual readers of the text, from James Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Ulysses to an otherwise unknown French woman who married a London waterman in the mid-nineteenth century. Elsewhere attention to provenance yields bizarre results, when Luther and Melanchthon’s 1523 pamphlet depicting the pope-ass and the monk-calf (two ‘monstrous births’ which are taken to reveal the corruptions of the Catholic church) turns up in the library of the mathematician and eugenicist, Karl Pearson. Could he have seen the Reformation as a clash of good and bad bloodstocks?!
The exhibition is on until 23 December, and there is a website at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/Babies/