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Making a virtual embryo. This animation of a stage 20 (50±1 day) Carnegie embryo was produced by scanning the whole specimen with magnetic resonance imaging. The image data was then displayed as a virtual embryo whose apparent three-dimensionality and movements create an illusion of life. MRI is most suitable for embryos older than Carnegie stage 12, when signal-to-noise and contrast become sufficient for useful images. Publication on a website made the pictures of Carnegie embryos accessible to a large and diverse audience. According to the author, a specialist in medical imaging, this includes pregnant women, science writers, teachers, academics, publishers, exhibit designers, medical and high school students, boyfriends of pregnant girlfriends, TV and movie producers, abortion advocates, stem-cell research advocates and religious leaders. The images have also been used in textbooks, research papers, television productions, other websites, training software and art projects.
Bradley R. Smith, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
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The fate of the Carnegie collection. Only from the 1960s did Streeter’s horizons and O’Rahilly’s stages begin to be used in hospitals. They were one of the standards against which ultrasound was calibrated. By that time, description of human embryology had lost out even in the Carnegie Department to an experimental and increasingly molecular approach. The marginalization became physical when in 1975 the collection was moved out to the University of California, Davis. In 1991, it returned to the East Coast, this time to the National Museum of Health and Medicine at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. This Human Developmental Anatomy Center has been at the forefront of a ‘kinetic revolution’: sections were digitized and scanned with technologies such as magnetic resonance. Old specimens appeared in a new guise.
Public embryology
The Carnegie Department communicated to the general public in exhibitions, lectures and plainly written news bulletins illustrated with photographs of early embryos.
In the 1930s, these displays and publications spoke the language of human breeding, or eugenics, in contrast to Mall’s earlier emphasis on the role of environment in abnormal development. Improving conditions could extend the individual life-span, but only ‘particular mating’—helped by the Eugenics Record Office, another Carnegie department—could affect the egg. Agricultural metaphors jostled with technological images: eggs were ‘like the automobile, made of materials of unequal durability, necessitating discard when much of it is still strong and intact’.
By the 1920s human embryology was communicated to laypeople on a fairly large scale, most prominently in the controversial framework of sex education. (High) schools taught some embryology, but frogspawn was more accessible and a lot safer. The crucial shift came in the 1960s, when major curriculum reform promoted the entry of human reproduction and images of human embryos into biology classrooms.
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Embryos at the fair. At the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’ World’s Fair organized in Chicago for its centennial, human embryos were displayed in two separate exhibits. In the Hall of Science, ‘The history of man: embryology’ by the (Catholic) Loyola University School of Medicine was accompanied by educational text and X-ray images. By contrast, the popular sideshow ‘Life’ was advertised at the entrance by a ‘pickled’ two-headed fetus in a basket held by a wooden stork. These displays were not only linked in magazine stories, but also both obtained embryos from Chicago hospitals, albeit one through a gynæcologist’s gift and the other on the black market. The Loyola exhibition was later moved to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, while ‘Life’ toured state fairs until its owners went out of business in the mid-1940s.
‘The Loyola University School of Medicine human embryo exhibit’, from Eben J. Carey, Medical science exhibits: a century of progress, Chicago World’s Fair, 1933 and 1934: medicine, surgery, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, hospitals, veterinary medicine, Chicago: Century of Progress, 1936, p. 115.
Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago, Ill.
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Embryos at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair
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A high-school textbook containing photos of human embryos. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century the best-selling school textbooks largely avoided the topic of human reproduction and dealt with evolution only in advanced grades or—in the United States—in ways designed not to offend creationists. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, university biologists on the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) of the American Institute of Biological Sciences involved themselves directly in modernizing the high-school curriculum and producing textbooks that dealt with human reproduction much more thoroughly. In a chapter on ‘reproduction in animals’, Carnegie photographs of human embryos show ‘three stages of development’.
Photographs by Chester F. Reather from Biological science: an inquiry into life, a revision of BSCS, High school biology: yellow version, prepared by John A. Moore et al., New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1963, p. 475.
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A high-school textbook containing photos of human embryos, 1963
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