Making Visible Embryos: online exhibition charts development of images of the unborn
28 April 2009
Making Visible Embryos, which was funded by a History of Medicine Enhancement Award from the Wellcome Trust and can be accessed for free, uses dozens of images - many of them rarely reproduced - to trace the visual history of the unborn from medieval art and medicine through to ultrasound scans and test-tube babies.
In doing so, the site reveals how the modern picture of pregnancy was made and how its icons became prominent symbols of new life.
"Images of embryos are commonplace today and, for all the controversy over abortion and certain types of research, we tend to take them for granted," Dr Nick Hopwood from the University's Department of the History and Philosophy of Science said.
"People contemplating a pregnancy buy advice books that feature various images that are also shown at school and in the press. Yet many of our grandparents would have imagined the process in very different ways."
Dr Hopwood and Dr Tatjana Buklijas created the exhibition to show how the embryological view of life was produced. It will remain online as a permanent resource.
The website interprets more than 120 little-known drawings, engravings, woodcuts, paintings, models, X-rays and ultrasound scans and also shows how more familiar images became popular.
"Our understanding of the nine months of pregnancy is organised around the development of an embryo and fetus into a baby and images are crucial to how we imagine this," Dr Buklijas added. "Two hundred and fifty years ago there were no such representations. Standing back and looking at how they were made and communicated should help us to understand a major part of the scientific account of how we come to be."
Click through the gallery below to view some of the images.
The pregnant Virgin
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The most frequent representations of pregnancy in medieval and early-modern Christian art show the expectant Virgin Mary. Jesus is depicted as a child inside her transparent belly or, in sculptures, within a niche closed by glass doors. This early-18th-century oil painting was copied from an engraving of a sandstone sculpture made between 1400 and 1410 for the Bavarian pilgrimage site of Bogenberg.
Diocesan Museum, St Pölten, Austria
Diocesan Museum, St Pölten, Austria
The coming child
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Before 1800, anatomists depicted the ‘child to come’ small but fully formed, with arms and knees bent, wrapped tightly in the uterine membranes. It grew to set itself free from its covering, but, in striking contrast to later images, did not develop. These pictures represent hidden processes; the firm little ball, floating in water, was a world unto itself. Tightly rolled and turned inwards, the membranes protecting the soft core like the rind of a fruit or the bark of a tree, it was meant to remain hidden until spontaneously revealed at birth.
Woodcut from Jacob Rueff, ‘De conceptu et generatione hominis’, 1554
Wellcome Library, London
Woodcut from Jacob Rueff, ‘De conceptu et generatione hominis’, 1554
Wellcome Library, London
The model fetus
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The Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History in Florence, opened in 1775, housed a famous workshop for anatomical wax models. These teaching tools were seen as equally vivid but more democratic, less scarce and less perishable than human corpses. The collection included a series of human ‘feti’ produced around 1800 by Clemente Susini and his school. Wax figures from the 15th day to the end of pregnancy are mounted on six wooden panels. This one is the first, and shows ‘feti’ from 15 to 90 days (bottom right to top right). We see very little development, but mainly a progressive increase in size.
Zoology Section of ‘La Specola’, Museum of Natural History, Florence
Zoology Section of ‘La Specola’, Museum of Natural History, Florence
Haeckel’s embryos
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Professor of zoology in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) sought to place biology at the centre of a cosmic synthesis of science, religion and art. He taught that in the course of embryonic development, individuals repeat the most important changes through which their adult ancestors passed during the evolutionary development of the species. Haeckel still shapes our view of the world, but was widely accused of speculation, dogmatism and even fraud.
This double plate from ‘Anthropogeny’ (1874) shows fish (F), salamander (A), turtle (T), chick (H), pig (S), cow (R), rabbit (K), and human (M) embryos at ‘very early’ (I), ‘somewhat later’ (II) and ‘still later’ (III) stages. It was meant to illustrate the similarity between human embryos and those of other vertebrates. Specialists and religious opponents accused Haeckel of forging this plate, but he responded that his figures were schematics, not intended to be exact. They stayed in his books and were very widely copied, but still attract controversy today.
This double plate from ‘Anthropogeny’ (1874) shows fish (F), salamander (A), turtle (T), chick (H), pig (S), cow (R), rabbit (K), and human (M) embryos at ‘very early’ (I), ‘somewhat later’ (II) and ‘still later’ (III) stages. It was meant to illustrate the similarity between human embryos and those of other vertebrates. Specialists and religious opponents accused Haeckel of forging this plate, but he responded that his figures were schematics, not intended to be exact. They stayed in his books and were very widely copied, but still attract controversy today.
The symbolist embryo
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During the 1890s, the human embryo and fetus entered the disconcerting and sometimes even nightmarish world of symbolist art. A group of French printmakers and especially the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley appropriated normal and monstrous fetuses to comment on such fin-de-siècle concerns as the declining birth rate and degeneration, to oppose feminism and more generally to thematise creative as well as procreative failure. This drawing by Beardsley (1872-98) caricatures the Pre-Raphaelites’ exalted, mystical image of women. ‘New life begins’ refers to the medieval poet Dante Alighieri’s celebration of his love for Beatrice and the model was likely Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s well-known Beatrice painting, ‘Beata Beatrix’. Beardsley also subverts the sacred iconography of Madonna and child by substituting an aborted fetus for the figure of Christ.
‘Incipit vita nova’, c.1893. Reproduced from Brian Reade, Beardsley, London: Studio Vista, 1967
‘Incipit vita nova’, c.1893. Reproduced from Brian Reade, Beardsley, London: Studio Vista, 1967
Manufacturing models
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The early 20th century saw an increase in the availability of embryo images to the public, in popular magazines and books. In Dresden, the mouthwash manufacturer Karl August Lingner founded the German Hygiene Museum and organised workshops to produce visual aids for the exhibitions. In this photograph we see Ella Lippmann (1882-1967) finishing a wax embryo. From 1918 until 1959 she was the head modeller or mouleuse.
Photograph, before 1945, Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden
Photograph, before 1945, Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden
Carnegie Department of Embryology
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Opened in 1914 at Johns Hopkins University, the Carnegie Institution Department of Embryology amassed thousands of embryos and set up the staging system by which human development is still classified today. In this photograph from the 1970s, researchers are shown examining some of Osborne O Heard’s reconstructions and consulting George L Streeter’s ‘Developmental Horizons’. The cabinet behind contains reconstructions and, on the top row, what may be specimens in jars.
Carnegie Institution of Washington
Carnegie Institution of Washington
The virtual embryo
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This is a still from an animation of a stage 20 (about 50 days old) Carnegie embryo, which was produced by scanning the whole specimen with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The image data was then displayed as a virtual embryo whose apparent three-dimensionality and movements create an illusion of life. Publication on a website made the pictures of Carnegie embryos accessible to a large and diverse audience. According to the author - a specialist in medical imaging - this includes pregnant women, science writers, teachers, academics, publishers, exhibit designers, medical and high-school students, boyfriends of pregnant girlfriends, TV and movie producers, abortion advocates, stem-cell research advocates and religious leaders. The images have also been used in textbooks, research papers, television productions, other websites, training software and art projects.
Copyright Bradley Smith
Copyright Bradley Smith
The embryo in colour
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In the 1960s, the embryo and fetus were shaped in the public imagination largely by the images of the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson in the magazine ‘Life’ and in the book ‘A Child is Born’, a bestseller in numerous languages that informed mothers-to-be about how their baby was developing. Nilsson’s images placed development firmly within the female body and as an addition to a heterosexual couple. In contrast to the blurry black and white ultrasound scans, these colour photographs of the developing fetus became iconic.
This photograph was taken in London in the early 1990s by the British photographer Anthea Sieveking. The pregnant woman in the picture is looking at what appears to be the 1990 edition of ‘A Child is Born’.
Wellcome Images, London
This photograph was taken in London in the early 1990s by the British photographer Anthea Sieveking. The pregnant woman in the picture is looking at what appears to be the 1990 edition of ‘A Child is Born’.
Wellcome Images, London
The grade-one embryo
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This phase-contrast light micrograph from the mid-1990s exemplifies the pictures of early embryos that came to dominate media reports on reproductive technologies from the 1980s on. The image of an eight-cell embryo comes from an assisted conception clinic. Taken by a reproductive biologist at Hammersmith Hospital for the purpose of grading embryos in an IVF treatment, it is supposed to demonstrate the perfect appearance of those designated ‘grade one’, or ‘of sufficient quality to be used for in vitro fertilisation’. The picture was later acquired by Wellcome Images. In the past few years, it has been used widely, from a Dorling Kindersley book on the human body to an online tutorial for those studying at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
Wellcome Images, London
Wellcome Images, London
Cubist Baby
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The contents of the womb, once out of sight, are now everywhere to be seen. The images on our screens - strange yet beautiful, clinical yet familiar - are new in many ways but their forms carry traces of this history through which our views of human development have been made.
‘Cubist Baby’, a sculpture from Suzanne Anker’s series ‘Origins and futures’, which counter balances pyrite minerals (often called ‘fool’s gold’) with images of embryos built by 3-D computer programs.
‘Cubist Baby’, a sculpture from Suzanne Anker’s series ‘Origins and futures’, which counter balances pyrite minerals (often called ‘fool’s gold’) with images of embryos built by 3-D computer programs.