Sara Ray, PhD student, University of Pennsylvania
The Monsters of Peter and Wolff: Monstrous Births and Anatomical Collecting in the Formation of Developmental Embryology, 1697-1782
Description from Sara:
"In the basement of the Russian Academy of Sciences there was--according to the eighteenth century embryologist Caspar Wolff--a "storehouse of monsters." Wolff was describing the hundreds of abnormal human fetuses which had been collected and preserved by Tsar Peter the Great half a century earlier--a collection which Peter had established in order to inquire into the causes of monstrosity and processes of generation. This paper treats the history of Peter's curious collection (and Wolff's use of it as research material in his theory of epigenesis) as a unique vantage point from which to revisit the eighteenth-century shift toward developmental embryology."
Date
-