Generating Gendered Flesh: Exchanging, Displaying, and Consuming Human Body Parts during the Eighteenth Century

Lianne McTavish, University of Alberta                                                  

Generating Gendered Flesh:

Exchanging, Displaying, and Consuming Human Body Parts during the Eighteenth Century

 

Some bioethicists and other scholars decry what they consider the unprecedented commodification of the human body in the twenty-first century, citing, for  example, the increasing practice of organ transplants. Among reasons for the current trade in human body parts, they note the general tendency toward biomedicalizing practices which ‘emphasize transformations of bodies, largely […] technoscientific interventions ’ (Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., 2010, 2; italics in original). Yet the transnational exchange and consumption of body parts has a lengthy history, one that predates biomedicalizing discourse.

            In this paper, I will explore the collection, exchange, and display of human flesh during the early modern period—focusing on how they both represented and produce gendered flesh—in early modern France, Italy, England, and the Netherlands. Early modern Europeans practiced corpse medicine, using dead human bodies, especially mummies, and such bodily products as blood, urine, feces, and bone, in various external and internal treatments (Sugg, Corpse Medicine, 2008). Certain kinds of cannibalism were acceptable, allowing human remains to be stolen, purchased, transformed, distributed, and sold around the globe. One of my primary interests is in the display of body parts in private collections and museums, including those of Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, Giuseppe Flajani, Frederik Ruysch, and Honoré Fragonard. In addition to desiccated syphilitic limbs, deformed fetal skeletons, and appendages suspended in spirits, these collections featured calcified fetuses, preserved tumours, and marvelous products sometimes generated within and excreted from human bodies both European and ‘other.’ Moving beyond their supposed didactic function, this paper analyzes these displays primarily in terms of the gendered meanings they conveyed, while also noting how the physical objects hovered between their potential classification as anatomical models, natural history specimens, and wonderful exempla.