The business of men

As a botanist, anatomist and the chief obstetrician to Amsterdam’s poor in the 1670’s, Frederik Ruysch taught the city’s midwives, delivered babies, and examined miscarried fetuses. He didn’t just examine them; he liked to tinker with them too. He brought many fetal bodies home with him to the Bloemgracht number 15, where he prepared and embalmed them. With some, he got especially creative. As Trudy Dehue writes in her brilliant history of pregnancy research, Ei, foetus, baby (2023), Ruysch conserved one such fetus in a bottle « resting on a pillow of placenta », while giving another « a little collar and a little hat, along with a bed of blood vessel », while a third was placed in the opened jaw of an equally dead snake. Ruysch grew very skilled at deconstructing the little bodies, and reconstructing them in a new, cutesy pose. Like an early modern Anne Geddes, he would rest the bodies on a bed of gall, kidney or bladder stones, for example, or « he gave them objects to hold, like a translucent little handkerchief made of very thin, veined human membrane, that one such tiny skeleton would mournfully hold up to its hollow little eye sockets. »

Female reproductive health has long been the business of men. In Ei, foetus, baby (Egg, Fetus, Baby), Trudy Dehue examines the lengths to which these men have gone to answer the question of what happens during conception, in a pregnant belly and during labor. Dehue is a professor emeritus of History and Theory of Science at the University of Groningen; the book charts five centuries of Western academic knowledge about pregnancy: its methods, its assumptions, its effects. It is a richly layered history covering roughly five centuries of research, mostly focused on the Netherlands but often widening its scope to the rest of the Western world, and broadly leading up to our current moment: from the first creative imaginations of what a sperm and egg looked like and how they relate to each other, via the horrifying testimonials of seventeenth-century surgeons who proudly butchered their patients, to X-rays, ultrasound technology and mobile fetal monitoring systems strapped on pregnant bellies.

The ever-clearer image of the fetus that emerged made the lives of pregnant women better and safer, but has at the same time played into the hands of anti-women’s rights movements. Progress isn’t always progress.