Making Visible Embryos

  • Tatjana Buklijas &
  • Nick Hopwood
Exhibition at http://tinyurl.com/9m8s7u

“Do we not find a rosebud as beautiful in its own way as a rose?”, mused the great German anatomist Samuel Thomas Sömmerring. He was defending his revolutionary work, published as a series of large-format plates in 1799, showing that embryos took different forms at different stages.

The story of how embryos have been depicted is the subject of the online exhibition Making Visible Embryos, by historians of science Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood.

Before Sömmerring, anatomists adhered to the Aristotelian theory that the individual adult was present in the germ cell, and simply grew in size — no rosebuds, just small, perfect roses. The debate was only whether the homunculus was encapsulated in the egg or the sperm. The concept of the embryo as an unformed blob did not fit with theories of the Creator's perfection.

Then experimentation took over. Human embryos were in short supply, but Sömmerring systematically acquired them from abortions, picked out the best examples, which he assumed to be less malformed, and drew his own conclusions.

Scientists initially struggled to grasp how embryos develop. Credit: ANATOMISCHES INSTITUT, BASEL

The exhibition of more than 120 images, from engravings and wax models to X-rays and ultrasound scans, presents how scientists have struggled to understand the embryo in its biological and moral contexts. We learn how Jesus was often depicted as a small but fully formed child in the womb of the Virgin in medieval and early-modern paintings. We learn how German experimental zoologist Ernst Haeckel, one of Charles Darwin's most insistent propagandists, used his considerable artistic skills to present images of developing embryos — and massaged some to support his theory that different species pass though similar embryonic stages. And we discover how the emotionally powerful images of Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson were, ironically, taken from aborted fetuses. In the 1960s, these photographs influenced the modern public view of the fetus as a child waiting to be loved, and thus fuelled the fire of anti-abortionists.

The website is structured by theme; each section runs chronologically and information is provided at three levels of depth. This architecture mostly works well. But it is less suited to complex discussions, such as the nineteenth-century scientific controversies over embryology, in which it is easy to lose track of the different players, their arguments and how it all fitted together. But the pictures speak volumes, even though images of the embryo are nowadays commonplace.