“Bodies in Spirit: Anatomical Preparations, Embryology, and Cosmologies of Nature 1780-1840”

Sara Ray (University of Pennsylvania)

The anatomy museum of John Hunter (1728-93) was filled with tiny bodies preserved in spirits. These were fetuses at varying stages of gestation: John and his brother William had pioneered techniques of anatomical preparation that allowed for the mysterious, feminine process of generation to be brought under Enlightened, scientific view. This paper addresses the materiality of early embryology by examining how anatomists-- the comparative and the surgical-- interpreted fetal preservations within competing philosophies of nature at the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular, the paper uses the work of Hunter and of the Dutch anatomist Willem Vrolik to probe how fetal preservations-- both series representing normal development and collections of “monstrous births”-- spoke to larger scientific debates about natural laws, deep time, and transformation that historians have more often associated with the geology and natural history of this period. Vrolik was a comparative anatomist and physiologist who did pioneering work in the field of teratology, or abnormal embryonic development. His museum situated his embryological work within a medical cosmology encompassing much of nature beyond the confines of the human body. The materiality of the embryo itself demanded this: what did similarity in embryological development suggest about human-animal closeness? What might monstrous births suggest about the transformation of species? By focusing on these museum collections, the paper will consider these tiny bodies as pieces of evidence about the nature of Nature in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

“Visualizing the Prodigy of the Vegetable World: On the Discovery of the Corpse Flower in Nineteenth Century Sumatra”

Elaine Ayers (Princeton University)

In May of 1818, the young naturalist Joseph Arnold trekked into the staggeringly hot rainforest outside of Padang, Western Sumatra, on the botanical expedition that would seal his fate. After hiking through “impenetrable forest” for almost a week, one of Arnold’s hired Sumatran guides discovered what the naturalist described as “the greatest prodigy of the vegetable world”: a flower so large and monstrous that Arnold feared scientific disbelief. The flower measured several feet in circumference and emitted what Arnold described as “precisely the smell of tainted beef.” The discovery of Rafflesia arnoldi, the largest flower in the world—now affectionately named the “corpse flower” because of its unsavory fragrance, began what became one of the strangest instances of botanical evidence, or lack thereof, in history. Arnold and his team proved unable to preserve the flower to ship back to experts in England; the flower’s petals rotted before they could bring it back to camp, their paper proved too small to accurately illustrate the whole plant, and all that remained of it, pickled in spirits, was the plant’s spongy pistil. By following the plant’s failure to travel across oceans, I will examine how naturalists have communicated intangible qualities like scent and horror, and how botanical knowledge is created when traditional forms of evidence are missing. That Rafflesia has captured botanical imagination for two centuries without ever growing outside of Southeast Asia points to the ways in which knowledge is created and communicated in impossible situations.

“Evidence of Creation, Creation of Evidence: The Ambiguities of the Chambered Nautilus”

Laurel Waycott (Yale University)

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” or so said Keats. Historians of science are very adept at understanding the complexities involved in translating natural phenomena into fact, and fact into truth. Less critical attention has been paid to beauty and how it has shaped expectations of what the truth looks like. This study explores how one aesthetic element—the notion of pattern—came to be a vital tool in the interpretation of nature. This study combines cultural history with the history of science to examine how patterns shape the stories we tell about nature. I explore one of these patterns, the spiral, through a case study of the chambered nautilus, a ubiquitous symbol at the union of art and science. Decontextualized from its native waters in Melanesia, the shell of the nautilus has traveled through Western culture for centuries, picking up new meanings along the way. In the nineteenth century, the nautilus was cited as evidence in numerous debates, most notably as evidence both for and against divine creation. From one perspective, the ever-growing spiral shell was the perfect endorsement of teleology. From another, it was proof that nature’s beauty was a result of problem-solving skills, honed through evolution. Debates were shaped by public perception of the organism, which took the cross-section of the chambered shell as an emblem of personal growth. This study therefore takes the conversation about evolution and creation in a new direction by exploring the influence of biology in attempts to understand individual growth and cultural change.

“Proving Prehistoric Man: Interpreting Geological and Archaeological Evidence in Interwar East Africa”

Emily Kern (Princeton University)

In 1939, the director of the Ugandan Geological Survey, geologist E.J. Wayland, authored a confidential report on the status of geological and archaeological research in British East Africa. Originally sent to Uganda at the end of World War I to prospect for mineral resources in service of the future of British industrialized warfare, he instead became fascinated with the problem of ‘Stone Age Man’ in East Africa. In his report, Wayland described the evidence for the succession of prehistoric human cultures that had occupied the shores of the ancient precursor of modern-day Lake Victoria, arguing that it was impossible for natural forces to have produced distinctive flakes of stone and shell discovered at numerous sites in Uganda and Tanzania; rather, these fragments were detritus from tool-making by prehistoric humans. Coupled with new data gained on the history of the region’s geological formations, including the East African Rift zone, Wayland’s work suggested startling new conclusions about the long history of human settlement and cultural activity in Africa. These arguments also forced geologists and archaeologists to reconsider their narratives of the geologically recent migration and settlement of the African continent, which assumed that prehistoric human peoples had entered Africa from the north before dispersing throughout the continent. In this paper, I consider the relationship between macro-scale geological evidence and micro-scale archaeological knowledge, arguing that Wayland’s research allowed human history to be correlated with geological evidence, leading to new conclusions about human antiquity and patterns of prehistoric migration.