The 'From Generation to Reproduction' project, University of Cambridge
The main public-engagement output was an online exhibition, Making Visible Embryos, launched in 2008. The exhibition shows how images of embryos have become the dominant representations of pregnancy and prominent symbols of biomedical hope and fear. It begins with the various radically different medieval depictions of the unborn and highlights the work that has gone into producing pictures, models and sonograms of embryological development.
In 2009, an expanded group of nine Cambridge historians of medicine was awarded a five-year Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to build on and expand their research and activities exploring the history of reproduction. The new programme, entitled Generation to Reproduction, will systematically reassess the history of reproduction.
Generation and reproduction are at the heart of medicine. They involve theories of sex and gender; entities such as seeds, germs, embryos, monsters and clones; concerns about creation, evolution, degeneration and regeneration; investments in maternity, paternity and heredity; practices of fertility control, potency and childbirth; and health relations between citizen and state, individual and population.
These crossroads for rich traffic to and from biology, the social sciences and the humanities have been of intense public and historical interest since the 1970s. Yet for all the excellent historical work, the major frameworks are showing their age and research tends to be dispersed among sub-disciplines and periods.
Research under the new programme pools expertise in every major period in Western history, and approaches as diverse as quantifying parish records and interviewing scientists, to provide a comprehensive reinvestigation of the field. The team will explore gradual, long-term shifts and modern transformations - from ancient fertility rites and beliefs that the human acquisition of a rational soul was the crucial event in generating a person, to the technological revolutions of the twentieth century that have made reproduction increasingly independent of sex.
Among other research outputs, the group will produce a volume of specially commissioned 5000-word chapters for advanced undergraduates, organize conferences on broad reproductive themes, and carry out focused work in four complementary research strands. Three range from antiquity to (early) modernity, and the last integrates diverse aspects of the 20th-century revolution. Events and outreach will include a major exhibition on 'Books and Babies: Communicating reproduction' at Cambridge University Library in July-December 2011.
Image: Dr Nick Hopwood, who leads the 'Generation to Reproduction' team. Credit: Francis Neary