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The natural history files
Pergamon
Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci., Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 583–587, 2001 Printed in Great Britain
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
Essay Review The Natural History Files Palmira Fontes da Costa*
Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (London and New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), ix + 250 pp. ISBN 1-86064-228-4 US$29.95 £23.51. Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999) xi + 315 pp. ISBN 0-8014-3609-5 Hb £22.50. Jan Bondeson’s A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities and The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History are very similar in terms of both character and subject matter. Each one is a collection of self-contained essays about extraordinary and curious phenomena of nature from the annals of western medicine and natural history. In addition, the various essays include related aspects of ethnology and of the history of literature and folklore that have a particular relevance to Scandinavian sources. Both are amply illustrated with photographs, which, however, could have been given a more active role in the accounts themselves and are not always sufficiently well documented. A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities takes its title from the similarity between its own layout and an old cabinet of curiosities in which disparate objects and specimens were displayed together in a confined space. This was usually used to emphasize the variety of the collection, in such a way that the contrast between the various objects displayed could be better appreciated. Accordingly, the book presents, in no apparent order, various essays on spontaneous human combustion, snakes and frogs living in the human stomach, the strange disease phthiriasis, people with tails, cases of apparent death and premature burial, giants, and the role
* Secc¸a´o de Historia e Filosofia da Cieˆncia, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Quinta da Torre, 2825 Monte de Caparica, Portugal.
PII: S1369-8486(01)00022-X 583
584
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
of maternal impressions in the conception of birth marks and malformed children. It also includes specific sections on the celebrated and well studied case of Mary Toft, the alleged eighteenth-century rabbit breeder, the history of three specimens at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, as well as the case of Julia Pastrana, publicly exhibited as the ‘Baboon Lady’ in the nineteenth century. Bondeson’s 1999 book, The Feejee Mermaid, could be considered a sequel to A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities: although their titles suggest focuses on different disciplinary fields, it is, in fact, difficult to speak of a distinctive medical or natural historical approach for most of the extraordinary phenomena covered in the two books.1 In the more recent work, Bondeson simply pursues his interest in the odd and the unexpected, exploring accounts of showers of toads and other animals, of toads and frogs living in stone, and humorous cases of animals on trial. He also discusses the topic of public exhibitions of remarkable specimens in specific essays about the ‘dancing horse’, ‘the learned pig’, two remarkable elephants and the dried specimen of the alleged Feejee mermaid. The Feejee mermaid figures in the title of the book and is depicted on its cover. Moreover, its special status is further emphasized in the preface where Bondeson remarks that it seems to have even been used as source material for an episode of the popular television series The X-Files (p. x). The author’s self-assumed role as a lover of the odd and the unexpected is particularly noticeable from a reading of the two books. It is a subject which, he remarks, he has been researching ever since he was a medical student in the early 1980s (p. viii). Bondeson writes clearly and vividly and the two books prove engaging reading. The breadth of reference of the various essays in the two books is, however, disconcerting. On the one hand, the citation of primary sources is sometimes incomplete or even absent. This is a crucial failing which dramatically reduces the books’ potential value for future scholarly research. On the other hand, the body of secondary sources seems to be awkward. Among others, Bondeson mentions articles from the Fortean Times and information from home pages on the internet, but tends to ignore the recent literature published on the subject by professional historians. The growing critical literature related to cabinets of curiosities, for example, is completely left out of either book.2 Also, seminal works such as Richard Altick’s The Shows of London (1978) and Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston’s article on the study of monsters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and England are simply omitted from the secondary sources.3 It is also striking, for example, that the references for the essay ‘Mary Toft, the Rabbit Breeder’ list two articles by Dennis Todd and yet omit his more exhaustive study on the subject (Todd, 1995).
1
On the close relation between medicine and natural history, see Cook (1996). See, for example, the influential works of Paula Findlen (1994) and Krysztof Pomian (1994). For a brief overview on the subject of the culture of curiosity, see Whitaker (1996). 3 See also their recent book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (Daston and Park, 1998). 2
The Natural History Files
585
Having said this, the value of Bondeson’s references to contemporary medical sources should be stressed. Bondeson’s enterprise seems to be set in contrast to what he describes as ‘the modern, rationalist textbooks of the history of science’ (The Feejee Mermaid, p. viii). Instead, he positions his undertaking alongside some nineteenth-century works on curiosities of medicine and natural history which, in his view, have successfully combined entertainment and instruction. He acknowledges A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities as being originally inspired by George Gould and Walter Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Gould and Pyle, 1897) (p. vii), an encyclopedic work mainly written from a medical perspective.4 Likewise, in The Feejee Mermaid (pp. vii–viii) Bondeson recognizes his debt to the successful Curiosities of Natural History (1865) by the medical practitioner and historian Frank Buckland. Not only are the two books about curiosities but, in a certain way, they can be viewed as ‘historiographic curiosities’ in themselves. First, they both present an odd combination of essays in the form of long-term accounts and case studies. Second, the first type of essays have a wide-ranging historical scope, ranging from ancient sources such as Hippocrates and Pliny to the more recent and ‘enlightening’ scientific literature on the subject. Yet, at the same time, they give consistent emphasis to the particular. In the section on animals on trial, for example, the author mentions the detail of how, ‘on another occasion, a pig that had killed and eaten a small child was convicted not only for murder but also for the sacrilegious crime of eating meat on a Friday’ (The Feejee Mermaid, p. 145). Moreover, both books suffer from a defect often ascribed to historical works written by scientists in their use of present-centred categories and of present-favouring values. However, they both also show a worthy interdisciplinary concern in their approach to the subject.5 Some of the essays in the two books are particularly valuable for convincingly showing the long persistence of belief in alleged extraordinary phenomena held by naturalists and physicians and discernible in the medical literature. In A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, for example, Bondeson, claims to have discovered no less than sixty-eight case reports of live reptiles or amphibians in the human gastrointestinal tract evenly distributed through the medical literature of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 47). Similarly, in the essay about the power of the imagination of the mother in the conception of deformed children, he remarks how, long after this concept had become obsolete among the medical profession in Germany and France, it still had many believers in Britain, and this not only among oldfashioned country practitioners but also among several hospital consultants of
4 The subtitle of this book stated that it was ‘An encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origins to the present day, abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed’. A ‘popular edition’ was published in 1901. 5 For the issue of present-centred history, see Ashplant and Wilson (1988) and Brush (1995).
586
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
repute. He also notes that articles on the topic were published in medical periodicals until the 1890s (p. 157). Bondeson’s findings have important epistemological and sociological implications, namely for the historical understanding of the processes involved in the validation and discrediting of natural knowledge.6 The author does not really engage with the problem of explaining the persistence of belief in extraordinary phenomena among the medical community. His use of present-centred categories and the fact that his books are essentially descriptive hinders him in such a task. On the one hand, in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities he describes reputable naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus, Georges-Louis Buffon and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as supporting the theory that snakes and frogs were able to live as parasites in the human gastrointestinal tract (p. 38). On the other hand, he remarks how fortunate it was that Robert Boyle ‘spent less time trying to prove silly medical theories than pursuing his work in experimental physics and chemistry, where he made the groundbreaking discovery of Boyle’s law relating the volume and pressure of gases’ (p. 148).7 Similarly, he does not comment, for example, on the fact that Thomas Bartholin is described as supporting some of the alleged extraordinary phenomena and refuting others. It is, nevertheless, very puzzling for him that ‘the vegetable lamb myth becomes even more widespread in the seventeenth century, when the nonexistence of the vegetable “water-sheep” should have become evident even to the Chinese and the Tartars’ (The Feejee Mermaid, p. 217). In short, the two books are consistently entertaining and, in spite of their shortcomings, surpass previous works on the subject intended for the general public.8 They are likely to have a limited use for the professional historian but can certainly be profitable in bringing to the attention of scholars topics and events which could usefully warrant further study. References Ashplant, T. G. and Wilson, A. (1988) ‘Present-Centred History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge’, The Historical Journal 31, 253–274. Brush, S. G. (1995) ‘Scientists as Historians’, OSIRIS 10, 215–231. Cook, H. J. (1996) ‘Physicians and Natural History’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 91–105. Daston, L. and Park, K. (1998) Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books). Dear, P. (ed.) (1991) The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press). Findlen, P. (1994) Possessing Nature: Museums, Collections and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA.; London: University of California Press).
6 The question of the authentication of knowledge has recently attracted considerable attention. See, for example, Shapin (1995) and Dear (1991). For the problematic status of observations of extraordinary phenomena in terms of authentication, see Westrum (1979) and Westrum (1982). 7 For a very different view of Boyle’s medical concerns, see Schaffer (1987). 8 Compare, for example, with Thompson (1930) and Howard (1977).
The Natural History Files
587
Gould, G. M. and Pyle, W. L. (1897) Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders). Howard, M. (1977) Victorian Grotesque, An Illustrated Excursion into Medical Curiosities, Freaks and Abnormalities, Principally of the Victorian Age (London: Jupiter Books). Pomian, K. (1994) Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press). Schaffer, S. (1987) ‘Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy’, Science in Context 1, 55–85. Shapin, S. (1995) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Thompson, C. J. S. (1930) The Mystery and Lore of Monsters with Accounts of some Giants, Dwarfs and Prodigies (London: Williams & Norgate Ltd.). Todd, D. (1995) Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press). Westrum, R. (1979) ‘Knowledge about Sea-Serpents’, in R. Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. University of Keele, Sociological Review Monograph 27, 293–314. Westrum, R. (1982) ‘Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites’, in H. M. Collins (ed.), Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Source Book (Bath: Bath University Press), pp. 185–217. Whitaker, K. (1996) ‘The Culture of Curiosity’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 75–90.
Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci., Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 583–587, 2001 Printed in Great Britain
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
Essay Review The Natural History Files Palmira Fontes da Costa*
Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (London and New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), ix + 250 pp. ISBN 1-86064-228-4 US$29.95 £23.51. Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999) xi + 315 pp. ISBN 0-8014-3609-5 Hb £22.50. Jan Bondeson’s A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities and The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History are very similar in terms of both character and subject matter. Each one is a collection of self-contained essays about extraordinary and curious phenomena of nature from the annals of western medicine and natural history. In addition, the various essays include related aspects of ethnology and of the history of literature and folklore that have a particular relevance to Scandinavian sources. Both are amply illustrated with photographs, which, however, could have been given a more active role in the accounts themselves and are not always sufficiently well documented. A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities takes its title from the similarity between its own layout and an old cabinet of curiosities in which disparate objects and specimens were displayed together in a confined space. This was usually used to emphasize the variety of the collection, in such a way that the contrast between the various objects displayed could be better appreciated. Accordingly, the book presents, in no apparent order, various essays on spontaneous human combustion, snakes and frogs living in the human stomach, the strange disease phthiriasis, people with tails, cases of apparent death and premature burial, giants, and the role
* Secc¸a´o de Historia e Filosofia da Cieˆncia, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Quinta da Torre, 2825 Monte de Caparica, Portugal.
PII: S1369-8486(01)00022-X 583
584
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
of maternal impressions in the conception of birth marks and malformed children. It also includes specific sections on the celebrated and well studied case of Mary Toft, the alleged eighteenth-century rabbit breeder, the history of three specimens at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, as well as the case of Julia Pastrana, publicly exhibited as the ‘Baboon Lady’ in the nineteenth century. Bondeson’s 1999 book, The Feejee Mermaid, could be considered a sequel to A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities: although their titles suggest focuses on different disciplinary fields, it is, in fact, difficult to speak of a distinctive medical or natural historical approach for most of the extraordinary phenomena covered in the two books.1 In the more recent work, Bondeson simply pursues his interest in the odd and the unexpected, exploring accounts of showers of toads and other animals, of toads and frogs living in stone, and humorous cases of animals on trial. He also discusses the topic of public exhibitions of remarkable specimens in specific essays about the ‘dancing horse’, ‘the learned pig’, two remarkable elephants and the dried specimen of the alleged Feejee mermaid. The Feejee mermaid figures in the title of the book and is depicted on its cover. Moreover, its special status is further emphasized in the preface where Bondeson remarks that it seems to have even been used as source material for an episode of the popular television series The X-Files (p. x). The author’s self-assumed role as a lover of the odd and the unexpected is particularly noticeable from a reading of the two books. It is a subject which, he remarks, he has been researching ever since he was a medical student in the early 1980s (p. viii). Bondeson writes clearly and vividly and the two books prove engaging reading. The breadth of reference of the various essays in the two books is, however, disconcerting. On the one hand, the citation of primary sources is sometimes incomplete or even absent. This is a crucial failing which dramatically reduces the books’ potential value for future scholarly research. On the other hand, the body of secondary sources seems to be awkward. Among others, Bondeson mentions articles from the Fortean Times and information from home pages on the internet, but tends to ignore the recent literature published on the subject by professional historians. The growing critical literature related to cabinets of curiosities, for example, is completely left out of either book.2 Also, seminal works such as Richard Altick’s The Shows of London (1978) and Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston’s article on the study of monsters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and England are simply omitted from the secondary sources.3 It is also striking, for example, that the references for the essay ‘Mary Toft, the Rabbit Breeder’ list two articles by Dennis Todd and yet omit his more exhaustive study on the subject (Todd, 1995).
1
On the close relation between medicine and natural history, see Cook (1996). See, for example, the influential works of Paula Findlen (1994) and Krysztof Pomian (1994). For a brief overview on the subject of the culture of curiosity, see Whitaker (1996). 3 See also their recent book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (Daston and Park, 1998). 2
The Natural History Files
585
Having said this, the value of Bondeson’s references to contemporary medical sources should be stressed. Bondeson’s enterprise seems to be set in contrast to what he describes as ‘the modern, rationalist textbooks of the history of science’ (The Feejee Mermaid, p. viii). Instead, he positions his undertaking alongside some nineteenth-century works on curiosities of medicine and natural history which, in his view, have successfully combined entertainment and instruction. He acknowledges A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities as being originally inspired by George Gould and Walter Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Gould and Pyle, 1897) (p. vii), an encyclopedic work mainly written from a medical perspective.4 Likewise, in The Feejee Mermaid (pp. vii–viii) Bondeson recognizes his debt to the successful Curiosities of Natural History (1865) by the medical practitioner and historian Frank Buckland. Not only are the two books about curiosities but, in a certain way, they can be viewed as ‘historiographic curiosities’ in themselves. First, they both present an odd combination of essays in the form of long-term accounts and case studies. Second, the first type of essays have a wide-ranging historical scope, ranging from ancient sources such as Hippocrates and Pliny to the more recent and ‘enlightening’ scientific literature on the subject. Yet, at the same time, they give consistent emphasis to the particular. In the section on animals on trial, for example, the author mentions the detail of how, ‘on another occasion, a pig that had killed and eaten a small child was convicted not only for murder but also for the sacrilegious crime of eating meat on a Friday’ (The Feejee Mermaid, p. 145). Moreover, both books suffer from a defect often ascribed to historical works written by scientists in their use of present-centred categories and of present-favouring values. However, they both also show a worthy interdisciplinary concern in their approach to the subject.5 Some of the essays in the two books are particularly valuable for convincingly showing the long persistence of belief in alleged extraordinary phenomena held by naturalists and physicians and discernible in the medical literature. In A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, for example, Bondeson, claims to have discovered no less than sixty-eight case reports of live reptiles or amphibians in the human gastrointestinal tract evenly distributed through the medical literature of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 47). Similarly, in the essay about the power of the imagination of the mother in the conception of deformed children, he remarks how, long after this concept had become obsolete among the medical profession in Germany and France, it still had many believers in Britain, and this not only among oldfashioned country practitioners but also among several hospital consultants of
4 The subtitle of this book stated that it was ‘An encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origins to the present day, abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed’. A ‘popular edition’ was published in 1901. 5 For the issue of present-centred history, see Ashplant and Wilson (1988) and Brush (1995).
586
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
repute. He also notes that articles on the topic were published in medical periodicals until the 1890s (p. 157). Bondeson’s findings have important epistemological and sociological implications, namely for the historical understanding of the processes involved in the validation and discrediting of natural knowledge.6 The author does not really engage with the problem of explaining the persistence of belief in extraordinary phenomena among the medical community. His use of present-centred categories and the fact that his books are essentially descriptive hinders him in such a task. On the one hand, in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities he describes reputable naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus, Georges-Louis Buffon and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as supporting the theory that snakes and frogs were able to live as parasites in the human gastrointestinal tract (p. 38). On the other hand, he remarks how fortunate it was that Robert Boyle ‘spent less time trying to prove silly medical theories than pursuing his work in experimental physics and chemistry, where he made the groundbreaking discovery of Boyle’s law relating the volume and pressure of gases’ (p. 148).7 Similarly, he does not comment, for example, on the fact that Thomas Bartholin is described as supporting some of the alleged extraordinary phenomena and refuting others. It is, nevertheless, very puzzling for him that ‘the vegetable lamb myth becomes even more widespread in the seventeenth century, when the nonexistence of the vegetable “water-sheep” should have become evident even to the Chinese and the Tartars’ (The Feejee Mermaid, p. 217). In short, the two books are consistently entertaining and, in spite of their shortcomings, surpass previous works on the subject intended for the general public.8 They are likely to have a limited use for the professional historian but can certainly be profitable in bringing to the attention of scholars topics and events which could usefully warrant further study. References Ashplant, T. G. and Wilson, A. (1988) ‘Present-Centred History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge’, The Historical Journal 31, 253–274. Brush, S. G. (1995) ‘Scientists as Historians’, OSIRIS 10, 215–231. Cook, H. J. (1996) ‘Physicians and Natural History’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 91–105. Daston, L. and Park, K. (1998) Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books). Dear, P. (ed.) (1991) The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press). Findlen, P. (1994) Possessing Nature: Museums, Collections and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA.; London: University of California Press).
6 The question of the authentication of knowledge has recently attracted considerable attention. See, for example, Shapin (1995) and Dear (1991). For the problematic status of observations of extraordinary phenomena in terms of authentication, see Westrum (1979) and Westrum (1982). 7 For a very different view of Boyle’s medical concerns, see Schaffer (1987). 8 Compare, for example, with Thompson (1930) and Howard (1977).
The Natural History Files
587
Gould, G. M. and Pyle, W. L. (1897) Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders). Howard, M. (1977) Victorian Grotesque, An Illustrated Excursion into Medical Curiosities, Freaks and Abnormalities, Principally of the Victorian Age (London: Jupiter Books). Pomian, K. (1994) Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press). Schaffer, S. (1987) ‘Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy’, Science in Context 1, 55–85. Shapin, S. (1995) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Thompson, C. J. S. (1930) The Mystery and Lore of Monsters with Accounts of some Giants, Dwarfs and Prodigies (London: Williams & Norgate Ltd.). Todd, D. (1995) Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press). Westrum, R. (1979) ‘Knowledge about Sea-Serpents’, in R. Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. University of Keele, Sociological Review Monograph 27, 293–314. Westrum, R. (1982) ‘Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites’, in H. M. Collins (ed.), Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Source Book (Bath: Bath University Press), pp. 185–217. Whitaker, K. (1996) ‘The Culture of Curiosity’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 75–90.