Embryos in Wax: Models from the Ziegler Studio, with a Reprint of "Embryological Wax Models," by Friedrich Ziegler (review)

In this gorgeous book on the Ziegler embryo models, seventy pages of beautifully printed plates of anatomical models follow nine short chapters detailing the rise of modeling anatomical forms across the nineteenth century to the First World War. Calling his book a "general historical framework within which to display and view the [Ziegler] models" (p. 5), Nick Hopwood questions how embryological objects related to printed matter, journals, and monographs; the book is then about "the media of science," as well as about embryos themselves (p. 5). As the text argues, models and their catalogs played a fundamental role in rendering embryos knowable objects—objects both "fascinating and controversial" (p. 1) and "academically authoritative and relevant" (p. 25).

Individual chapters introduce Adolf Ziegler, who began modeling anatomical structures in wax in Freiburg in the 1850s, and his son Friedrich, who inherited the modeling business. By 1900, the majority of embryological models used for teaching and research in European universities were made by the Zieglers. The models significantly altered research methodology and teaching in the life sciences and spurred "extraordinary physical and intellectual transformations" in medical and popular understandings of generation (p. 69). Though Hopwood briefly explores the implications of models for theoretical biology and embryology (included are Ziegler's relationships with Wilhelm His and Ernst Haeckel), throughout he emphasizes the practices of anatomy and embryology and the business of model making. Chapters 5 through 7 map innovation in modeling techniques, from His's microtome to Born's plate method, while chapters 3, 8, and 9 examine what Hopwood calls "plastic publishing," including the novel ways in which the Zieglers gained clientele, such as the production of catalogs to advertise model series (see chapter 3). These chapters also consider how new representations of human development made their way to wider audiences in popular anatomical and hygiene exhibits at fairs and state museums. For example, "social gynecologist" Wilhelm Liepmann's "Museum for the Study of Women" (pp. 72-75): Liepmann exhibited embryological models to convince Berlin's working-class women of the dangers of industrialism for their reproductive systems.

The book asks more questions than it answers. The social, intellectual, and political history of embryo models is simply too much for these pages to hold. For example, the author introduces a "culture of modeling" among embryological scientists that requires further definition and elaboration (p. 57). The reader runs smack into the following: "[Franz] Keibel [the anatomist and embryologist] was so strongly associated with modeling embryos that in July 1914, at a farewell party to celebrate his call to a chair in Strasbourg, the company finished their meal with a human embryo modeled in marzipan" (p. 58). The passage is meant to illustrate scientists' dependence upon models for carrying out the work of embryology. Researchers' worlds were so full of models that finding one on the dessert plate might not seem so odd. More explicit context and comment from the author on this episode could have contributed to the valuable notion of a modeling culture.

More troubling than men eating marzipan human embryos, though, is the author's scant treatment of women and the politics of embryo collection. The Zieglers modeled actual anatomical structures, and all human embryos originated in some women, somewhere. There are two stories of miscarriage in the book, in one of which the woman herself took the "fruit" to her physician (p. 70). Hopwood also cites the origins of the His embryos in miscarriage, abortion, and "very occasionally the corpse of a pregnant woman" (p. 69). However, information essential to the success and business of embryo modeling is absent—including...