Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos (review)

In the opening pages of Icons of Life, Lynn Morgan invites readers into a dark storage area in the basement of a biology building at a venerable women's college in the Pioneer Valley. In the poorly lit store room they encounter, as Morgan did summers earlier, dozens of grimy, motley sized jars of human fetuses. There are a hundred or so specimens "packed three to four deep on industrial metal shelves" (p. 1). And while a few of the fetuses in this clearly forgotten collection are well preserved, most are in various states of decay: in one jar, "inadequately sealed with masking tape," is a fetus that has "turned an uncanny bright turquoise"; in another, where the formaldehyde has completely evaporated, there remains only a "sodden gray sludge" (p. 1). Morgan confesses to a range of confused feelings when first confronting "the smelly, dead, decaying materiality" (p. 17) of these specimens so at odds with the exquisitely rendered free-floating fetal subjects that have come to inhabit the visual field of North American life over the course of the past twenty years. Confronting them, albeit only virtually, I confess to feeling only excitement: my father had kept a more modest collection of fetuses in jars while a graduate student at an East Coast Ivy. His collection met a loud and messy end when the temptation to touch proved too much for curious minds and little hands. But how he had come to possess these specimens and by which practices they were procured in the first place had always remained slightly hazy matters. An answer, it seemed, was finally at hand. "By what logic," Morgan asks, "would anyone have amassed a collection of human embryos and fetuses, and why were they stored in a dark corner of the basement?" (p. 3). By what logic, indeed.

Answering this question, Morgan takes readers on a meticulously detailed expedition that deftly traverses decades and continents; moves with a scholar's critical eye through national archives, public records, lab notes, medical books, disciplinary disputes, and the backroom offices of museum curators; scours with care the scholarly literatures of history, anthropology, sociology, biology, science studies, and law; while also generously engaging and broadening the rich insights of feminist theorists on the shifting cultural politics of reproduction. What we learn is that the specimens Morgan encountered in the dark basement of Mount Holyoke College, while likely donated by alumnae, represent the material, if haphazardly assembled, remnants of a larger debate and shifting worldview in the human sciences during the first half—and especially the first quarter—of the twentieth century. According to Morgan, they are the medium through which anatomists and embryologists sought to forge and consolidate not only an empirically based origin story of human life and development but also the exclusive authority of biomedicine to tell it.

Morgan singles out Franklin Paine Mall as a central player in this effort. The first director of the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., Mall oversaw the founding of a collection of fetal specimens that would number nearly ten thousand by the 1940s. Enlisting the help of private physicians, surgeons, hospital staff, and technicians—or a reliable network of health care personnel whose work with women put them in immediate proximity to embryonic matter—Mall and his colleagues set about developing painstaking procedures for processing, preserving, and displaying the harvested specimens. More significant still, Morgan argues, these procedures "convert[ed the specimens] from useless waste material into valuable, productive objects" and, in the process, fundamentally altered their ontological status in ways with which we are today fully wrestling (p. 61). In her words, "The great achievement of Mall and his colleagues was that they shook the embryo free of its social trappings and reconfigured it as a naturalized biological specimen, where it could eventually be re-presented as...