Monstrosity in Medical Science
Race-Making and Teratology in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4755741 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Miriam Rich, Miriam Sommers Rich (Dartmouth Hospital, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 513-536 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/726315 |
| OpenAlex | W4385865697 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
This essay analyzes the medical study of “monstrous birth” as a site of race-making in the nineteenth-century United States. It argues that the medical theorization of monstrosity was structured by multiple logics of race, which both shaped and emerged from medical authorities’ efforts to classify and interpret anomalous newborn bodies. Materialized at the intersection of these logics, the biological monster theorized a racial order that was hierarchical, temporalized, and vulnerable to the dangers of women’s reproduction. In this context, monstrosity became a way to advance claims about the nature of racial hierarchy, articulate the threat and mechanism of racial degeneration, and negotiate the contradictions of shifting racial imaginaries across the nineteenth century. Exploring the medical engagement with monstrosity thus sheds light on entanglements of medical science and race-making in U.S. history, showing how practitioners produced and elaborated unstable concepts of scientific race, and revealing how race was linked to reproduction in the emergence of modern biomedical discourse
Art history · Biology · Context (archaeology · Hierarchy · Monster · Negotiation · Political science · Race (biology · Reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Genetics · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medical History and Research
Medical Bondage
The Idea of Race in Science
Faces of Degeneration
Laboring Women
The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race
A Political Anatomy of Monsters, Hopeful and Otherwise
Reproduction on the Reservation
A Hideous Monster of the Mind
Contested Bodies
The Curse of Civilised Woman
From Women's Expectations to Scientific Specimens
Traversing birth
Colonial Pathologies
Outcasts from Evolution
Partus sequitur ventrem
The Passing of the Great Race
Monsters and Patients
The Race of Hysteria
The Great Chain of Being
The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770-1870
Of monsters and fossils
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |