A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

The realm of the abnormal and the rare is once again becoming popular. The history of science and medicine, of literature and art seem to share today a sincere interest in the study of the world and lore of monsters and monstrosities. A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, inspired by the classic work of George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1897), joins an increasing list of recent papers and monographs that deal with the history of medical and cultural wonders.

Following the path opened by Gould and Pyle, Jan Bondeson’s book begins with a discussion of spontaneous human combustion and continues with chapters on snakes and frogs living in the human gastrointestinal tract, phthiriasis or lousy disease, the giants in the earth, apparent death and premature burial, maternal impressions, and many other anatomical oddities. As the author states in his preface, the layout of the book “resembles that of one of the old medical cabinets of curiosities. It aims to depict the odd, the bizarre, and the unexpected” (p. vii). Bondeson may have succeeded in this, and his catalog of medical curiosities will very likely satisfy the reader with a taste for the monstrous and the macabre.

The book may, nonetheless, disappoint the professional historian. For one thing, Bondeson’s prose and style are much closer to scientific journalism than to historiography. He has included an appendix on sources, but since the book contains no critical apparatus in the different chapters, the use that he has made of the primary sources remains unclear: we never know whom Bondeson is citing, or where exactly any given quotation can be found in the sources. On a different level, Bondeson has designed his book as a repository of curiosities without problematizing the connection between the different topics. The selection of chapters has thus a certain touch of randomness that seems to be based exclusively on personal preference. Furthermore, the curiosity that appears to link all the stories together seems to be only that of the late-twentieth-century reader. The very argument of the book gives further support to this impression: on the one hand, the phenomena described in the different chapters “provide some of the most striking examples that old medical errors die hard” (p. viii). On the other, however, “the opposite has proved true,” and modern research indicates that the most bizarre, such as the lousy disease, “may actually have existed” (ibid.).

Curiosity seems, then, to be defined mainly as the result of an epistemological confrontation between past belief and present evidence. It is from contemporary medical knowledge that Bondeson finds it possible to explain away, as in the case of the tailed people, for example, the origins of folk credibility. the different chapters of his book are full of stories or rare or bizarre individuals or objects. But the catalogue also consists of a set of old fables that have supposedly become true; or conversely, in what he saw as a variety of popular and medical errors that appeared to die hard. This veiled transition between different forms of historical, psychological, and epistemological curiosities seems, however, difficult to explain solely in terms of late-twentieth-century medical positions. The mummy of Julia Pastrana, for example, one of the most famous human marvels of the 1850s, is no longer a social curiosity: it is, rather, in Bondeson’s account, a medical case. The “ape-woman,” the “nondescript,” represents now “an extreme case of congenital hypertrichosis (with terminal hair) and gingival hyperplasia” (p. 243). Very likely, however, the notoriety that she reached during the mid-nineteenth century cannot possibly rest on her medical condition alone. This diagnosis may explain her deformity, but it says nothing about the conditions that turned her into a living curiosity.