‘Monstrous births’ and the making of race in the nineteenth-century United States
Credit: CC0 Public Domain From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, “monstrous births”—malformed or anomalous fetuses—were, to Western medicine, an object of superstition. In 19th-century America, they became instead an object of the “modern scientific study of monstrosity,” a field formalized by French scientist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This clinical turn was positioned against the backdrop
Jeanice Center
September 8, 2023