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  • Embryonic Individuals: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century Embryology and the Construction of Early-Modern Identity
  • Eve Keller (bio)

Some time in 1672, Theodore Kerckring conducted an autopsy of a woman who had died three or four days after her period. On opening her uterus, Kerckring found “a little round mass the bigness of a black cherry.” 1 Having determined from the widower that he had engaged in sexual relations with his wife within a few days of her death, Kerckring asked permission to “take the cherry home” so that he might investigate it further. When he dissected his specimen, Kerckring discovered something he thought amazing: “nature,” he said, “had wrought with so much activity in so small a time that one might already see the first lineaments of a child, since we observed in [the cherry] the head as distinct from the Body, and in the head we took notice of some traces of its principle organs.” 2

Kerckring’s discovery was reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in the midst of its review of his recent work on fetal osteology. Although Kerckring explicitly claims to have observed only “the first lineaments of a child” in his “black cherry,” in the rest of the report on his research, Kerckring is quoted as emphasizing the early morphological completeness of embryoes in general. By one month, he says, a conception “has the whole human shape, and the Bones thereof firm enough in many places to support the parts.” 3 Yet despite his exclusive concentration on the physiological question of fetal development—as opposed to the [End Page 321] more philosophical or theological issue of ensoulment—Kerckring is nonetheless at pains to refer to this incipient organism as a “child,” even as an “infant.”


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Figure 1.

Theodore Kerckring, Opera omnia anatomica (1717). Courtesy of The New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Kerckring’s sense of the embryo as a complete child, as opposed to merely a complete shape, is especially evident in his illustrations of early fetal development (fig. 1). In this plate, figure ii, which shows what Kerckring found in his three-day-old cherry, offers a miniature that seems to be emerging upward from a plane; though no internal organs are visible, one can discern the “child’s” facial features fairly distinctly. Figure iii in the same plate, which represents an “egg” opened two weeks after conception, portrays a creature without specific features, but with clearly delineated [End Page 322] limbs. Figures iv through vi in that illustration show the skeletons of what Kerckring explicitly calls “infants” at three, four, and six weeks after conception. These all stand not only upright but also in rather expressive postures. Other than growing in size, the only difference between the six-week-old and the three-week-old is that the older “child” seems ready for social interaction: given his posture and facial bearing, one might suppose him to be engaged in a conversation with some absent partner. Taken together, the figures are seemingly embued not only with structural completeness but also with some sense of personhood. The implication of embryonic personhood is all the more remarkable because Kerckring relied on a theory of generation that suggested that procreation was essentially a mechanical process—that the coming-to-be of a new organism could be explained according to the laws of matter and motion; he thus refers to the one-month-old “child” as a “self-sustaining engine.” 4

Neither of the ideas manifested in the Transactions report of Kerckring’s work—of the personhood of the embryo or of the embryo as a machine—was unique to Kerckring. Both were rather part of the larger landscape of theoretical and empirical embryology of the later seventeenth century, during the course of which theorists increasingly looked to mechanism for an explanatory framework in which to understand the process of the development and growth of organisms. At the same time, however, the theories they proposed assert the emergence of a distinctive and coherent identity of the entity created at ever earlier points in the process of generation, thus explaining Kerckring’s willingness to designate a three...

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