On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (28 page)

A conjoined twin, with two bodies sharing one head. Photo by Joanna Ebenstein © 2008. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist and the Museum of Anatomical Waxes “Luigi Cattezneo” (Museo Delle Cere Anatomiche “Luigi Cattaneo”), Bologna, Italy.

A cyclops specimen from the Vrolik collection. Photo by Joanna Ebenstein © 2008. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist and the Vrolik Museum, University of Amsterdam.

Common body plans, such as having two forelimbs, two hind limbs and other tetrapod traits, were the result, Geoffroy argued, of generative laws. One of these generative laws of growth he called the law of
soi pour soi
, or “like attracts like.” He argued that this embryological law of attraction of similar parts was the underlying impetus for organ formation and general animal composition. This same law also explained why things could go monstrously wrong. The law of attraction of similar parts was employed to cover the recurrent stable forms (normality) and the anomalous malformations. A child born with cyclops syndrome was explained by Geoffroy as a case of soi pour soi. If an external force should accidentally arrest the
development of the olfactory organ (perhaps the result of blocked blood flow in the embryo), then the gap between the two eyes would be bridged by the two structures because of soi pour soi. With the olfactory barrier removed, two eyes would fuse into one.
³⁷

Against Hunter’s claim that monsters were errors of metamorphic code, Geoffroy argued that monsters like the cyclops were produced by external causes, accidents to the fetus forming in utero. He tested his epigenetic hypothesis by subjecting many incubating chick embryos to violent trauma and extreme temperatures. Though he mostly just killed chickens, he did manage to produce deformed monster chicks, some without eyes, for example. These experimental results, together with his philosophical anatomy, led him to a general epigenetic view of monster formation.
³⁸
Monsters were departures from normality, but they further demonstrated the regularities of generative laws. Furthermore, their deviation represented a somewhat predictable derailing of these generative laws, brought on by violence of some kind to the fetal organism. Studying monsters told us something about embryology, but also something about the developmental morphology underpinning the taxonomical classifications of life. In the same way that monsters cannot be explained as “designed” for specific functions, so, too, other (normal) morphological patterns seem to exist without any such teleological explanation. These last points will prove more significant when we get to Darwin’s revolution.

THE MATERIALISTIC APPROACH TO EMBRYOLOGY
was gaining ground in the early nineteenth century, but it still offended many who saw the generation of life as one of the last “miraculous” territories left. Theologically minded naturalists had found the preformationist view of embryology more palatable because it suggested that all normal beings were successfully unrolled out of the procreative process just as the Creator had designed them: the seed person grew in utero but preserved the Designer’s essential format. Monsters, according to this preformationist view, were rare glitches in this unrolling process; they were perfect in their seed form, but some external force had spoiled the translation. This view denied purpose and design to the monsters but maintained it for every normal creature. Nature was still teleological, and monsters were only an exception. Epigeneticists such as Geoffroy, Hunter, and William Lawrence began to throw doubt on this basic assumption. Lawrence summarized the conventional apprehensions and then, like La Mettrie before him, dismissed any sanctimonious twaddle:

Regarding this business [embryogenesis] as the work of God, and having already assumed that all his works are perfect, they [the preformationists]
maintain that the young animal is originally perfect, and degenerates into a monster through the action of external forces. More accurate observation discloses to us in this affair merely the operation of secondary causes, and exhibits to us the production and development of the fetus as the result of vascular action in secretion and nutrition: in short, however his pride may be offended at hearing it, the simple truth is, that man, considered at the epocha of his first formation, and with respect to his corporeal frame, is a secretion.
³⁹

If man is a secretion, then he is not ideal at the
beginning
of embryogenesis but only at the
end
—and even then he is not perfect or ideal, but serviceable. Some of these secretions vary in extreme ways and end up as monsters; the rest of them vary to a lesser degree and end up as virtually everyone else.
⁴⁰
Perhaps Lawrence’s most surprising claim, eventually developed further by Darwin, is that all of us deviate from the norm; for this reason he would not bother to “draw very accurately the line of distinction between varieties and monstrous formations, which differ rather in degree than in kind.”

Lawrence argues that malformations can actually shed considerable light on the logic of life itself. For example, studying two preserved fetuses in John Hunter’s collection, Lawrence saw that a fetus could develop to a penultimate stage of development but lack a heart. Counterintuitive though it seemed, a human fetus could complete its formation (with minor morphological imperfections) without a rather essential vital organ. Lawrence underscored the importance of studying embryological monsters in order to unlock some of nature’s hidden secrets: “Monsters, in which considerable parts are wanting, seem peculiarly likely to assist in the prosecution of physiological researches. If we never saw animals, except in a perfect [fully developed] state, we could not form just ideas of the comparative importance of the different organs.” In fact, Lawrence argued, we would be led astray if we studied only the normal and the completed organisms. Because the heart and brain are so essential to the finished human, we might conclude that they are foundational for the developmental logic. But heartless fetal monsters are joined by equally surprising cases: the brainless and headless fetuses.

Acephalous (headless) fetuses were, and are, more common occurrences than one might imagine. Often the brain case is missing altogether and a truncated face terminates upward into a soft mass, sometimes covered by a smooth membrane. The neck is very short, making the reduced head
sit almost directly on the shoulders, but hair often grows at the base of the cranium formation and “the body is well formed in every respect, and generally reaches the full size.” Lawrence explains, “These children generally die very soon after they come into the world; but they have sometimes lived for many hours, cried, sucked, &c.”
⁴¹
The astonishing thing is that they should make it this far in the first place.

Terminal craniofacial anomalies like those studied by William Lawrence. Photo by Joanna Ebenstein © 2008. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist and the Museum of Anatomical Waxes “Luigi Cattezneo” (Museo Delle Cere Anatomiche “Luigi Cattaneo”), Bologna, Italy.

The lesson Lawrence draws from these cases is that there are two different physiologics to the human animal. Previously, scholars assumed that the complex organs (e.g., brain, heart) that play such a vital role in the functioning of the baby must also be essential to the construction of the animal in utero. But “the monsters just described,” Lawrence says, “prove that this is not the case.” We find instead that bones, cartilage, ligament, membrane, organs, cellular substance, intestines, and more can all be formed and become operational by the actions of the vascular system alone. A blood vessel system, Lawrence concludes, builds the body, and monsters have revealed this logic not only for themselves but for all humans. After birth,
of course, a new logic kicks in and vital functioning cannot be sustained without a heart and a brain. Poetically stated, the monster points the way to scientific truths but pays the price with its life. All humans deviate or vary slightly, but when the variation is extreme they become monsters and nature spontaneously aborts them. If they should somehow survive this natural editing, then, Lawrence says, “the hour of their birth is with them generally the hour of their death.”
⁴²

Lawrence lays to rest three very popular misconceptions about monsters. Regarding the theory that a mother’s imagination can corrupt the fetus, he asks what sort of mechanical process could operate from the mother’s imagination down to the womb, where it would then have to destroy the normally developing head and reconstruct a new monkey head or whatever. Furthermore, there is extensive evidence that women can suffer serious disorders (e.g., diseases, amputations) with no ill effect on the fetus, so frights and imaginings seem far too weak for fetal reconstruction. Next, he counters the theory that extreme monsters, such as the headless children, are caused by blunt or acute traumas to the mother’s gravid abdomen. For one thing, a majority of cases of unfortunate offspring are born to women who suffered no such violence. For another, if the heads were caved in or broken in half we should discover some excess matter in utero and some bruising or signs of trauma.
⁴³

Lawrence also criticized speculative monsterology. Too many naturalists conducted their work by saying to themselves, and their readers, that “it seems
reasonable
that x should follow after y, therefore it must be the case that x follows after y.” Lawrence’s generation had grown tired of such teleological speculations, and he pressed embryologists to restrain their imagination when ignorant of the facts.
⁴⁴
Theorizing that these “illogical” things can’t be happening simply because they upset our deep assumptions about a rationally designed nature only stalls our empirical understanding of real biology.
⁴⁵

Mr. Owen suggested to me that the production of monsters…presents an analogy to the production of species
.
CHARLES DARWIN

It may be advantageous to turn to non-functional, grossly maladapted,
teratologies when studying the properties of internal factors in evolution
.
PERE ALBERCH

A
S FAR BACK AS THE ANCIENT
Greek philosopher Empedocles, monsters have been considered possible jumping-off points for the evolution of new species. As we saw in
part I
, Empedocles speculated that prehistory contained a nightmarish environment of animated body parts, crawling around and clumping together until some accidental hybrids finally produced viable procreators. Nobody in Darwin’s era held quite so crude a theory, but it was entirely reasonable to consider the mysteries of species generation (transmutation or evolution) in light of individual generation (embryology). If monsters were individual deviations from the norm, then maybe they were the key to understanding species deviation. Did mutations in the individual lead to new branches on the phylogenetic tree?