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Wood-engraving of a cleaving dog
egg. Vogt was one of the first to use reproductions of
Bischoff’s lithographs of rabbit and dog
development. A fine developmental series on plates in an
expensive atlas created a very different effect when selected
drawings were copied without acknowledgement in a much harder
and more schematic medium, one figure at a time, on pages surrounded
by text. This one shows the yolk-filled products of the first
cleavage (d), with the polar bodies (e), in the space (c), surrounded
by spermatozoa in the zona (b) and the cells of the germinal
disc (a). Among the most widely copied embryological illustrations
of the nineteenth century, Bischoff’s long remained the closest
embryologists came to a picture of the earliest stages of human
life.
From Carl Vogt, Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller
Stände, 2nd edition, Giessen: Ricker, 1854, fig. 30, p.
495. 22 x 13 cm.
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Familiar letters on embryology. By using
the ends of very hard blocks, wood-engravings gave much finer detail than
the old woodcuts, but could similarly be printed with text in vastly more
copies than either copper-engravings or lithographs. This profoundly shaped
the visual world of nineteenth-century science. For embryology it was exploited
importantly by the embryologist, materialist and liberal politician Carl
Vogt, one of the most prominent writers on science in the years around the
revolution of 1848. He wrote zoological and physiological letters for ‘the
educated of all estates’ on the model of his mentor Justus von Liebig’s
Familiar Letters on Chemistry. Vogt explained that he had hesitated
before deciding to discuss reproduction. He went ahead in view of the success
of advice books ‘in duodecimo or even smaller format’. Though accessible,
Vogt’s long works were probably read as much within the universities as
beyond.
Embryos on show
Schools did not teach embryology, but non-medics had some access in
museums and ever cheaper illustrated books.
The general public could visit some state collections. For example,
in Vienna, the Florentine waxes were open to the
public every Saturday from 1822. The mid-1800s also saw the rise of
private anatomical museums. Their entrepreneurial
owners claimed, democratically, to target ‘the humble artisan’. The admission
charge—1 shilling for Joseph Kahn’s London
museum—was probably too high, but these were among the few attractions
to admit unaccompanied women, if often at different times from men.
Association with sex limited distribution of pictures and models
of embryos. They appeared in the popular museums in the titillating context
of naked and dissected bodies and genitals ravaged by venereal disease.
Embryology was not as prominent as geology and chemistry in the first great
wave of popular science. But interest in human origins was great and wood-engraving
made printing cheaper. So even before Darwinism middle-class
people did not have too much trouble finding images of development, if they
knew where to look.
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Handbill for an anatomical museum. This 1853
handbill for J. W. Reimers’ Anatomical and Ethnological
Museum, which at mid-century operated on London’s Leicester
Square, lists the company that embryology kept. The
museum advertised ‘A Complete Series of Models, illustrative
of the Science of EMBRYOLOGY, OR THE ORIGIN OF MANKIND,
From the smallest particle of vitality to the perfectly-formed
Fœtus’, along with models of the female body
and ‘Aztec Liliputians’. University classrooms provided
a very different frame.
Westminster City Archives.
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Handbill for an anatomical museum, 1853
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A vivid atlas based on models. In 1851, the self-styled
‘medical doctor’ Joseph Kahn opened an anatomical museum
in London. He displayed 340 models in wax and leather,
specimens in spirits, microscopical preparations and
images of genital pathologies. These unusually vivid
colour lithographs of wax embryos were published in
an atlas aimed at ‘Medical Gentlemen and other students
of natural development’. Kahn made the museum a front
for quack treatments for venereal disease, so when orthodox
practitioners closed ranks to reform the profession
it came under attack. In 1873, policemen closed the
museum under the Obscene Publications Act and smashed
the exhibits with hammers. By the mid-twentieth century
such objects were largely limited to fairgrounds, red-light
districts and medical collections.
A colour lithograph drawn by Mr. J. C. Frank, from
Joseph Kahn, Atlas of the formation of the human
body: in the earliest stages of its development, compiled
from the researches of the late professor M. P. Erdl,
London: John Churchill, 1852, plate 12. 28 x 21 cm.
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library.
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Kahn’s vivid atlas based on models, 1852
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