In an age in which religious feelings ran high, deformity was often taken as a mark of divine displeasure, or at least of a singularly bad time in the offing. Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses, which is especially rich in demonic creatures, has a fine account not only of the unfortunate Monster of Ravenna but also of the Monster of Cracow – an inexplicably deformed child who apparently entered the world in 1540 with barking dogs’ heads mounted on its elbows, chest and knees and departed it four hours later declaiming ‘Watch, the Lord Cometh.’ Allegory was a sport at which Protestant scholars excelled. In 1523 Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon published a pamphlet in which they described a deformed ‘Monk-Calf born in Freiburg and another creature, possibly human, that had been fished out of the Tiber, and interpreted both, in vitriolic terms, as symbols of the Roman Church’s corruption. Catholics responded by identifying the calf as Luther.
By the late 1500s, a more scientific spirit sets in. In Des monstres, his engagingly eclectic compendium of nature’s marvels, the Parisian surgeon Ambroise Paré lists the possible causes of monsters. The first entry is ‘The Wrath of God’, but God’s wrath now seems largely confined to people who have sex with animals (and so produce human-horse/goat/dog/sheep hybrids) or during menstruation (Leviticus disapproved). Luther’s Monk-Calf also appears in Des monstres, but shorn of its anti-papal trappings. It is, instead, a monster of the ‘imagination’, that is, one caused by maternal impressions – the notion, prevalent in Paré’s day and still in the late nineteenth century, that a pregnant woman can, by looking at an unsightly thing, cause deformity in her child. Like most of the other causes of deformity that Paré proposes (too much or too little semen, narrow wombs, indecent posture), the theory of maternal impressions is simply wrong. But it is rational insofar that it does not appeal to supernatural agents, and Des monstres marks the presence of a new idea: that the causes of deformity must be sought in nature.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, teratology – literally, the ‘science of monsters’ – begins to leave the world of the medieval wonder-books behind. When Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum historia was published posthumously in 1642, its mixture of the plausible (hairy people, giants, dwarfs and conjoined twins) and the fantastic (stories taken from Pliny of Cyclopes, Satyrs and Sciapodes) was already old-fashioned. Fortunio Liceti’s treatise, published in 1616, is mostly about children with clearly recognisable abnormalities – as can be seen from the frontispiece where they are assembled in heraldic poses. True, they include a calf born with a man’s head and, inevitably, the Monster of Ravenna. But even this most terrible of creatures is almost seraphic as it grasps the title-banner in its talons.
There is a moment in time, a few decades around the civil war that racked seventeenth-century England, when the discovery of the natural world has a freshness and clarity that it seems to have lost since. When vigorous prose could sweep away the intellectual wreckage of antiquity and simple experiments could reveal beautiful new truths about nature. In Norfolk, the physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne published his Pseudodoxia epidemica, or, enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths (1646). In this strange and recondite book he investigated a host of popular superstitions: that the feathers of a dead kingfisher always indicate which way the wind is blowing, that the legs of badgers are shorter on one side than the other, that blacks were black because they were cursed, that there truly were no rainbows before the Flood – and concludes, in each case, that it isn’t so. In another work, his Religio medici of 1642, he touches on monsters. There is, he writes, ‘no deformity but in Monstrosity; wherein notwithstanding, there is a kind of Beauty. Nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts, as they become sometimes more remarkable than the principal Fabrick.’ This is not precisely a statement of scientific naturalism, for Browne sees the works of nature – all of them, even the most deformed – as the works of God, and if they are the work of God then they cannot be repugnant. It is, in a few beautiful periods, a statement of tolerance in an intolerant age.
At Oxford, William Harvey, having triumphantly demonstrated the circulation of the blood, was attempting to solve the problem of the generation of animals. In 1642, having declared for the King, Harvey retreated from the turmoil of civil war by studying the progress of chick embryos using the eggs of a hen that lived in Trinity College. The Italians Aldrovandi and Fabricius had already carried out similar studies, the former being the first to do so since Aristotle. But Harvey had greater ambitions. Charles I delighted in hunting the red deer that roamed, and still roam, the Royal Parks of England, and he allowed Harvey to dissect his victims. Harvey followed the progress of the deer embryo month by month, and left one of the loveliest descriptions of a mammalian foetus ever written. ‘I saw long since a foetus,’ he writes, ‘the magnitude of a peascod cut out of the uterus of a doe, which was complete in all its members & I showed this pretty spectacle to our late King and Queen. It did swim, trim and perfect, in such a kind of white, most transparent and crystalline moysture (as if it had been treasured up in some most clear glassie receptacle) about the bignesse of a pigeon’s egge, and was invested with its proper coat.’ The King apparently followed Harvey’s investigations with great interest, and it is a poignant thought that when Charles I was executed, England lost a monarch with a taste for experimental embryology, a thing not likely to occur again soon.
The frontispiece of Harvey’s embryological treatise, De generatione animalium (1651), shows mighty Zeus seated upon an eagle, holding an egg in his hand from which all life emerges. The egg bears the slogan Ex Ovo Omnia – from the egg, all – and it is for this claim, that the generation of mammals and chickens and everything else is fundamentally alike, that the work is today mostly remembered, even though Harvey neither used the slogan himself nor proved its truth. Harvey has some things to say about monstrous births. He revives, and queries, Aristotle’s claim that monstrous chickens are produced from eggs with two yolks. This may not seem to amount to much, but it was the expression of an idea, dormant for two millennia, that the causes of monstrosity are not just a matter for idle speculation of the sort that Paré and Liceti dealt in, but are instead an experimentally tractable problem.
It was, however, a contemporary of Harvey’s who stated the true use of deformity to science – and did so with unflinching clarity. This was Francis Bacon. Sometime Lord Chancellor of England, Bacon comes down to us with a reputation as the chilliest of intellectuals. His ambition was to establish the principles by which the scientific inquiry of the natural world was to be conducted. In his Novum organum of 1620 Bacon begins by classifying natural history. There are, he says, three types of natural history: that which ‘deals either with the Freedom of nature or with the Errors of nature or with the Bonds of nature; so that a good division we might make would be a history of Births, a history of Prodigious Births, and a history of Arts; the last of which we have also often called the Mechanical and the Experimental Art’. In other words, natural history can be divided into the study of normal nature, aberrant nature and nature manipulated by man. He then goes on to tell us how to proceed with the second part of this programme. ‘We must make a collection or particular natural history of all the monsters and prodigious products of nature, of every novelty, rarity or abnormality.’ Of course, Bacon is interested in collecting aberrant objects not for their own sake, but in order to understand the causes of their peculiarities. He does not say how to get at the causes – he simply trusts that science will one day provide the means.