Book Review : Embryos in wax: models from the Ziegler studio, with a reprint of “Embryological wax models” by Friedrich Ziegler

Abstract

Although wax-models played a significant part in the making of natural knowledge, only recently have historians started to devote systematic attention to them. Nick Hopwood's Embryos in wax reconstructs the story of wax-models of embryos from the end of the eighteenth-century to the days in which new experimental agendas and the wider political events of the twentieth century resulted in the quiet withdrawal of the models to museums and institute stores. Documenting the models of the Ziegler studio, and discussing a variety of aspects associated with their making and use, this very well-crafted work sheds light on a practice and a set of objects that for more than half a century lay at the very heart of embryology. Reproducing Friedrich Ziegler's last catalogue of the models as well as a rich and lavish selection of photographs and colour plates, this study brings together fine scholarship and unexplored source material. At the same time, it also allows readers to navigate with great ease across both verbal and non-verbal domains. From the end of the eighteenth century those who engaged in the modelling of embryos could build on the achievements of anatomical ceroplastics. Yet, the representation of embryos gave rise to new problems. Models of embryos were supposed to track the early stages of life. As embryology moved from miniature representation of children to the investigation of progressive development, wax-modellers were charged with the task of visualizing processes that took place over time and out of sight. Embryos in wax reconstructs how models contributed to the conceptualization of embryos as isolated objects of investigation that were defined independently of the body of the mother. It elucidates how the choices that underlay the three-dimensional representations of embryos had social and political as well as theoretical implications. Thus, for instance, embryos in wax not only stimulated medical debates between evolutionary and mechanical approaches to embryology, and informed views of normal embryonic development, they also lay at the centre of forms of expropriation and exploitation of the female body, corroborated more or less élitist views of society, epitomized visions of progress, and substantiated eugenic anxieties. Associated with “the lower-status activities of teaching and popularisation” (p. 3), models of embryos have long lingered at the margins of historical investigations. Along with other objects, they have borne the consequences of an enduring divide between things, traditionally characterized as mute, silent and opaque, and words, typically fashioned as the privileged medium of communication. Placing models at the centre of a complex interplay between things, people and words, Hopwood's work shows that, in fact, models of embryos made sense of people (and words) at least as much as people made sense of models. While magnifying microscopic structures, wax-models of embryos hardly resembled anything that one could come to recognize as part of one's experience. Yet, they became powerful means of scientific communication. In order to illustrate how this happened, Hopwood takes readers back from the models to the busy laboratories in which they were made, the scientific practices and teaching methods they brought about, the forms of business and division of labour they supported, and the professional alliances and academic contempt they generated. Particular relevance is also given to the codification of the view that wax-models of embryos could be published; the relationship between “plastic publishing” and printed culture; and the bearing this relationship had on the publicity, credibility, and circulation of the models. The discussion of all these aspects cogently addresses “the historical challenge” of getting “behind the finished products” (p. 2). Hopwood's reconstruction of the role of models in defining what embryos and embryology were all about makes a powerful case for a more integrated historical analysis of the different media of science. His assertion that this book is, among other things, “about wax” (p. 5) may whet the appetite for further systematic discussion of the part played by specific material domains—in this case wax—in the objectification of scientific tenets and values. But readers will find in this engaging study both a valuable source and new directions for research. At a time in which interest in the history of three-dimensional anatomical waxworks is growing rapidly, I would not be surprised if Embryos in wax came to be regarded as a model.