Monstrous Conceptions

This talk explores the troubled history of “monstrous birth” in modern U.S. medical science, tracing the practices and ideas that transformed newborn bodies into scientific specimens of monstrosity. Recast as a biological phenomenon, the monster gained new social and cultural salience across the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Monstrosity gave form to pervasive anxieties about the meaning of racial difference, the fragility of racial descent, and the volatility of women’s reproduction—and contributed to ideas about deviant and defective bodies that still haunt us today.