The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner (review)

The Secrets of Generation is a landmark edited collection that looks at reproduction (human, animal, botanical) in the long eighteenth century from a wealth of different disciplinary standpoints, with contributors working across English, art history, medical history, and gender studies, examining a transnational long eighteenth century that spans Italy, Germany, England, and America.

The twenty-two chapters are grouped into four thematic sections. Beginning with the theme “Generation, Species, Breeding,” the volume opens with an ambitious chapter by Staffan Müller-Wille that uses the history of botanical gardens design as a starting point for tracking the emergence of biology as a discipline. The next subsection—”Fetus, Child, Mother”—turns to maternity and includes Corinna Wagner’s forceful reading of legal and medical responses to maternal violence alongside the sentimentalization of maternity. “Pathologies, Body Parts, Display” focuses on the anatomized body in medical history—a concern displayed throughout the collection—and the book closes with “Attitudes, Tropes, Satire,” which looks at reproduction as it is figured in print culture. These subsections are inevitably loose and overlapping. All contributions taken together, The Secrets of Generation provides an impressive picture of the vastness and interconnectedness of eighteenth-century conceptualizations of “generation,” life, and the sexed body. With essays touching on Carl Linnaeus’s flower beds, asexual reproduction, entrails, incest, infanticide, lactation, and hysteria, the collection describes how the fabrication of reproductive knowledge in the eighteenth century structured, and was structured by, competing political, religious, and cultural forces.

As the length of The Secrets of Generation prevents detailing all the chapters, I will briefly discuss here some of the contributions, with an eye to the early eighteenth-century remit and British focus of the Scriblerian. A highlight of the strong “Pathologies, Body Parts, Display” section is Lianne McTavish’s account of the importance of intestinal parasites within eighteenth-century formulations of reproduction. This essay on wormy entrails is followed by Darren N. Wagner’s examination of the construction and consumption of anatomical displays of male genitals. Mr. Wagner argues—aided by illustrations of “Inflated and dry’d,” pinned and two-toned dyed penises—that eighteenth-century anatomical culture consistently blurred the medical and the erotic, the educative and the sensational. He also makes a persuasive case for rereading the phallic syringe (such as Tristram Shandy’s “squirt”) in eighteenth-century print. With syringes used in artificial insemination and penile inflation they become more than just figurative phalluses: they become sexual and reproductive devices.

Immersion in eighteenth-century medico-bawdy is also provided by Donald W. Nichol’s essay on The Foundling Hospital for Wit (1743–1749) and The New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1768–1773). Mr. Nichol offers not so much an overarching argument but rather a whirlwind tour of bawdy quotable highlights from the two works, such as: “Hail pighog! by whose potent aid/My L–d his health had, and employ! /My L–y too was brought to bed /Heav’n bless it! of a chopping boy.”

While much has been written about “monstrous births” and theories of maternal impressions, David M. Turner’s contribution uses disability studies to take a fresh approach to this topic, and examines how accounts of “defective” children contributed to broader understandings of physical difference. Eighteenth-century concerns with monstrous births take on new, political resonances when read as reflecting preoccupations with child health and the awareness of population strength as a national resource. Something like Mary Toft’s rabbit-birth becomes no longer a remnant of earlier, fading superstitions (as per the standard reading) but shadowed by the rise of eugenics in the nineteenth century.

Similarly helpful is Sally Frampton’s examination of the ovarian pathology. Ms. Frampton details eighteenth-century reactions to growths in dropsical ovaries (bones, teeth and hair) and the blurring between swollen ovaries and pregnancy in eighteenth-century medicine: between the physiology and pathology of the organ. Ms. Frampton’s work is...