Food for Thought

Here's a tidbit for any Wonders and Marvels readers out there who may be thinking about starting a family.

Until the late seventeenth century, Galenic notions of the body as a complex system of fluids (humors) dominated. In the sport of baby-making, the end goal was to mix male and female "seed" in just the right quantity and quality to make a boy. So this meant that the hotter the better.

Men were considered hot and dry in humoralist models. So, if the seed mix was hot, a boy would be born.

So, here are a few seventeenth-century tips for all of you out there. If you want a girl, stick with those cold foods like fruit and lettuce. If you want a boy, head straight for foods that early-modern physicians classified as hot: wine, meat, arugula.

I'm not so sure about the recipe for dried stag testicles, though. If it works for you, let us know. Early doctors recommend that you sprinkle them liberally onto your food.

Imagine this: "Excuse me, Sire. But could pass the salt and testicles?"

For more eclectic musings on embryology, childbirth, chastity belts, brothel madams, you name it...
take a peek here.

Girls will be...boys?

Well, this one will certainly test the sensibilities of our gentle Wonders and Marvels readership! Remember: It's important to look history straight in the eye.

Or in this case, the private parts.

From Antiquity and well into the late eighteenth century, humoralist modes of anderstanding dominated medical practice and anatomical theory. Humoralism was associated with Galen, a second-century ACE Greek physician who lived in Rome. His work was substantially influenced by his predecessor Hippocrates.

Galen held that the body was governed by a system of fluids, of "humors": blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile. Each body had a "complexion" that was specific to the individual--and reflected a greater tendency toward one of the four humors. Men had a humoral complexion that tended toward "hot and dry." Women considered humorally "cold and wet." They were also seen as defective version of a more perfect male body.

Because a man’s body was hotter, his reproductive organs stayed more comfortably outside his body. Colder, female reproductive organs were instead tucked inside the body to maintain warmth. The vagina was therefore often represented an inverted penis and the ovaries as "female testicles" or "stones" in early medical illustrations.

For more on humoralism and the facts of life, be sure to head over to this post.

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Thomas Laqueur wrote the seminal work (I couldn't resist) on the One-Sex Model: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.

But academics love a good fight. And the reception of Laqueur's book started one of the best professorial boxing matches around about whether the one-sex model was as dominant as Laqueur claimed. So be sure to take a look at these:

Michael Stolberg, "A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries." Isis 94 (2003): 274-299.

Winfried Schleiner, "Early Modern Controversies about the One-Sex Model Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 180-191.

And Laqueur's response...

"Sex in the Flesh." Isis 94 (2003): 300-306.

Image: Andreas Vesalius, De Humani corporis fabrica, 1543 (courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London).

The Chicken or the Egg

Open an introduction to genetics textbook, and you'll find a few preliminary pages on preformationist theory. The underlying message is: Look here, look how far we've come. Look at how silly early embryological theory was.

The fact of the matter is that preformationism made perfect sense at the time--and it was a theory that dominated the embryological landscape for well over 100 years. Ovism (the idea that preformed humans existed in eggs) is what made the most sense to early-modern philosophers. It would take Kant and Blumenbach's theories in the 1780s for theorists to be able to imagine the idea of something coming from nothing, that an organism can form from disorganized matter.

So here's the question: How will history judge us in a few hundred years? What do we know for sure, right now, that is destined for the joke books of the future?

Image: Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine

Little Men in Sperm

Speaking of seeing what you want to see..

Something major happened during the scientific "revolution" of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Telescopes, barometers, blood circulation, air pumps, vacuums, early calculating devices, discovery of planetary systems...yes, yes, we know all about that.

The discovery of the egg and the sperm in 1672 and 1677 changed the way people understood babies--and how. Heated debates took place about whether possibly, just possibly, humans existed preformed in either the egg or the sperm. Animaculists argued that shrinky-dink-sized beings lay wait in the head of each sperm.

Ovists argued that tiny humans sat in each egg. At the end of the day, the ovists won out. One of the most difficult aspects of spermist theory to reconcile was the knowledge that there are millions of sperm in a single ejaculation. Surely God would not allow the genocide of all of those beings in a single embrace! And imagine what they had to say about going solo...

The best study out there on preformation is, without a doubt, Clara Pinto-Correia's The Ovary of Eve: The Egg and the Sperm and Preformation.

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IMAGE: Antonio Vallisnieri, Histoire della generazione dell'uomo e degli animali