By Allison Hill-Edgar
As described in Gendering the Non-binary, 1763, Part I, finding two unsigned engravings of intersex individuals bound in the back of Charles Nicholas Jenty’s Demonstration de la matrice d’une femme grosse et de son enfant a terme (Demonstrations of a pregnant uterus of a woman at her full time) from 1763–1764 in the collection of the NLM was both surprising and thought provoking. The juxtaposition of anatomical images illuminated the longstanding struggle between defining an idealized norm and recognizing the reality of human diversity. Furthermore, it highlighted the medical community’s interest in understanding sex and gender and how they associated non-binary bodies with a binary, functional construct of the female womb.
Throughout much of history, the womb has been an enigmatic and mystifying site containing both the secrets and problems of reproduction. Intersex bodies in particular elicited questions about generation, both how such bodies came to be and how they would reproduce. Before the era of surgical “normalization” of intersex genitalia as promoted by Dr. John Money in the mid 20th century, diverse bodies were an evident fact of life and efforts were made to understand and explain individuals’ particular anatomy.
An early example of their relationship to the womb was the concept of the seven-celled uterus that was established by Galen (131–201 CE) and that persisted into the Renaissance. In The Wandering Womb, Lana Thompson explains the theory that the uterus contained seven compartments—three for males, three for females, and one in the middle for hermaphrodites. Illustrated examples of this can be seen in medieval manuscripts, early Renaissance depictions such as Magnus Hundt’s 1501 “Human Uterus,” and Leonardo da Vinci’s famous anatomical drawing of a female body in 1510. After performing many of his own human and bovine dissections, da Vinci became the first person to document in 1511 that the uterus has only one compartment. These examples reveal that intersex presentations were not only known and accepted, but also were affiliated with the uterus as a site where they were produced, accommodated, or both. From this time onward, “individual lives and deaths appeared in obstetrics, so did personal witnessing and the practical aspect of extraordinary births” (Exceptional bodies in early modern culture: concepts of monstrosity before the advent of the normal).
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Another longstanding theory that connected the womb to anomalous bodies was that the maternal imagination had the power to affect and alter the physical outcome of the fetus. This concept originated with Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE) but endured into the 19th century, when it was replaced by the science of teratology developed by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Several examples of the power of the maternal imagination in medical literature can be seen in the works of Ambroise Paré, a 16th century French surgeon. His writings on women’s health depicted the female body as defective, dysfunctional, unstable, and when pregnant, capable of mentally conjuring “monstrosities.” Paré provides multiple illustrations of “witnessed” monstrosities, including conjoined twins, chimeras, intersex individuals, and people with missing or displaced appendages.
According to Daston and Park in Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, “women sometimes bore children with horns and tails not because they had slept with demons but because their overwrought imaginations had importuned a diabolical shape upon the soft matter of the fetus.” One of Paré’s most copied images was that of a hairy woman accompanied by a black child. The image appears in multiple subsequent medical texts by other authors, including “probably the most widely reprinted book on a medical subject in the 18th and early 19th century,” Aristotle’s Masterpiece.
First published in London in 1684 under the pseudonym of Aristotle, it elaborated upon the mysteries of sex, female anatomy, marriage, pregnancy, and midwifery. Multiple iterations continued to be sold until the 1930s. The image of the hairy woman and black child feature prominently in each edition, accompanied by the explanation that during intercourse, their mothers had contemplated St. John in his camel-haired garment and Ethiopia, respectively. This concept is also evident in the words of John Maubray, an 18th century Scottish physician and teacher of midwives in London who wrote a book called The Female Physician. In it, he stated that pregnant women, “ought discreetly to suppress all Anger, Passion, and other Perturbations of the Mind, and avoid entertaining too serious or melancholic Thoughts; since all such tend to impress a Depravity of Nature upon the Infants’ Mind, and deformity on its Body.” In other words, a mother’s mental state has the power to affect the form and function of the fetus. Although the theory of the damaging maternal imagination is no longer accepted in medicine, the idea that a woman’s mental issues might impact the outcome of the fetus persists. Julia Epstein argues in The Pregnant Imagination, Fetal Rights, and Women’s Bodies: A Historical Inquiry, that society continues to attribute the birth of a defective infant to “the secret passions” or “secret failure of its mother,” particularly in the context of substance use, which in some cases criminalizes pregnancy.
The binding of the intersex images into the Jenty female reproductive atlas, intentional or not, highlights a longstanding association between exceptional bodies and female reproduction. From antiquity to the present, the womb has been regarded as a complex, mysterious, powerful, and dangerous place, containing both the secrets and challenges of generation. Thus, any atypical physical presentation that did not match up to the norm of the average sized, adult, healthy, European man, was seen as a consequence of both the female body and mind. Investigating this perspective provides insight into the construction of gender and sex assignments in anatomical history.
Allison Hill-Edgar, MD, MFA, is an Artist and Independent Scholar and a Lecturer at the New York Academy of Art, NY, NY, Saint Lawrence University, Canton, NY, and the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY and a 2020 NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellow in the History of Medicine.