Nick Hopwood

Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud

Comparative illustrations of vertebrate embryos by the leading nineteenth‐century Darwinist Ernst Haeckel have been both highly contested and canonical. Though the target of repeated fraud charges since 1868, the pictures were widely reproduced in textbooks through the twentieth century. Concentrating on their first ten years, this essay uses the accusations to shed light on the novelty of Haeckel’s visual argumentation and to explore how images come to count as proper representations or illegitimate schematics as they cross between the esoteric and exoteric circles of science. It exploits previously unused manuscripts to reconstruct the drawing, printing, and publishing of the illustrations that attracted the first and most influential attack, compares these procedures to standard practice, and highlights their originality. It then explains why, though Haeckel was soon accused, controversy ignited only seven years later, after he aligned a disciplinary struggle over embryology with a major confrontation between liberal nationalism and Catholicism—and why the contested pictures nevertheless survived.

Artist versus Anatomist, Models against Dissection: Paul Zeiller of Munich and the Revolution of 1848

The uses of anatomical models in medical teaching changed dramatically during the nineteenth century. The most celebrated Enlightenment ceroplastics, the royal collections directed by the natural philosopher Felice Fontana in Florence and copied for the military-medical academy in Vienna, united science and art in three-dimensional encyclopaedias of the body. According to Fontana, one could learn more from the models in six months than from dissecting scarce human cadavers in six years. But he gave up wax for wood, and by the early nineteenth century anatomists routinely disparaged his collections as white elephants. Beauty and truth no longer went hand in hand. As anatomy broke up into specialized research programmes, works intended also for the public were criticized as aristocratic luxuries and vulgar entertainments. Above all, medicines rising authority was grounded in direct engagement with bodies, dead and alive. So when professors no longer had to rely on criminal corpses, but gained access to those of the poor, models were marginalized before they could seriously challenge dissection. They kept important roles in obstetrics, and gained new ones in specialties where objects were especially complex, rare, transient, hard-to-preserve and/or tiny, notably in pathology, dermatology and embryology. But wax, plaster, wood and papier mâche were uncomfortably as well as strategically placed between prepared body parts, with their stronger claim to authenticity, and drawings, which were more established and easily reproduced. By the end of the century models of normal adult anatomy, now mostly commercially made, were more widely used in medical education than ever before, but for special purposes only.1 No simple effect of increased corpse supply, this shift was negotiated by those involved in anatomy teaching at the same time as dissection was hotly debated. Johann Wolfgang von Goethes appeal for “plastic anatomy” vividly links the two discussions. The poet had dissected human cadavers and as a government minister been responsible for an anatomical institute, but, as reports of grave-robbing and murder spread from Britain, the old man rejected harsh new laws to requisition pauper corpses and advocated models as a humane surrogate for dissection.2 In Wilhelm Meisters Travels (1829) a mysterious sculptor leads the troubled Wilhelm away from a beautiful female cadaver to a workshop for models. The artist, based on Fontana, explains Romantically that “building up teaches more than tearing apart, joining together more than separating, animating what is dead more than killing over again what has already been killed”. Wilhelm becomes a “plastic anatomist”.3 But Goethes proposal of an institute of plastic anatomy for Berlin was rejected a few weeks before he died in 1832 and histories of modelling report no further reception of his comments until the 1890s.4 This failure appears to confirm that models had lost any chance of substituting for dissection. Only recently have medical schools begun to take alternatives seriously.5 Yet that is not the whole story. Medical professors were the main patrons and customers, but they could not dictate models’ production and uses. Many modellers—a diverse bunch of artists and doctors—did accept the medical control that increasingly limited artists’ autonomy. Mid-century initiatives worked around the growing dominance of dissection by collaborating with discipline-builders to carve out more specialized niches, carefully negotiating the conditions under which models of normal adult anatomy would have a role, or concentrating on lay audiences.6 But Fontana had difficulty managing artists he treated as hired hands,7 and professors in early nineteenth-century France had to push modellers used to aristocratic commissions to submit to the disciplines of professional science.8 The same move to learning by seeing and doing that created opportunities for makers of visual aids also fixed dissection in the medical curriculum. But though widely recognized by law, it remained controversial as a final punishment for poverty, and the relative merits of natural and artificial preparations continued to be discussed.9 This article aims to expand our understanding of the range of mid-nineteenth-century negotiations over models and dissection, and to recover their ferocity. It is about Paul Zeiller (1820–93), a previously little-researched modeller who uncompromisingly challenged anatomical authority.10 He did not work in Paris or Vienna, the main centres of innovation,11 but in Munich, a bastion of Romanticism and reaction. Home to an active wax industry, the Bavarian capital of the arts and sciences in Catholic southern Germany provided the conditions in the mid-1840s for Zeiller to launch an extraordinary modelling career. Following some academically acclaimed work and the creation of a university position, during the 1848 revolution he confronted the professor of anatomy, demanding autonomy and drawing on Goethe to insist that his models should save proletarian corpses from dissection. Zeiller lost this argument, but kept his job until he resigned to found an anthropological museum. He and his wife Franziska Zeiller continued through the 1860s and 1870s to campaign against “knife anatomy”. Since Zeiller was both employed by the state and extremely embattled, more voluminous documents were generated than usual for such secretive artisans, and enough survive to offer exceptionally rich evidence of what was at stake.12 His struggles throw other modellers’ strategies into relief and show that models’ roles in relation to dissection and natural preparations were more intensely contested, and later, than has been assumed. More generally, the case illustrates how negotiations over the media of anatomical representation have intersected with the larger politics of death, dissection and the destitute. By also shedding light on the agendas and relations of private museums, it further expands our picture of medical science in and after 1848.

Approaches and Species in the History of Vertebrate Embryology

Recent debates about model organisms echo far into the past; taking a longer view adds perspective to present concerns. The major approaches in the history of research on vertebrate embryos have tended to exploit different species, though there are long-term continuities too. Early nineteenth-century embryologists worked on surrogates for humans and began to explore the range of vertebrate embryogenesis; late nineteenth-century Darwinists hunted exotic ontogenies; around 1900 experimentalists favored living embryos in which they could easily intervene; reproductive scientists tackled farm animals and human beings; after World War II developmental biologists increasingly engineered species for laboratory life; and proponents of evo-devo have recently challenged the resulting dominance of a few models. Decisions about species have depended on research questions, biological properties, supply lines, and, not least, on methods. Nor are species simply chosen; embryology has transformed them even as they have profoundly shaped the science.

The Cult of Amphioxus in German Darwinism; or, Our Gelatinous Ancestors in Naples’ Blue and Balmy Bay

Biologists having rediscovered amphioxus, also known as the lancelet or Branchiostoma, it is time to reassess its place in early Darwinist debates over vertebrate origins. While the advent of the ascidian–amphioxus theory and challenges from various competitors have been documented, this article offers a richer account of the public appeal of amphioxus as a primitive ancestor. The focus is on how the ‘German Darwin’ Ernst Haeckel persuaded general magazine and newspaper readers to revere this “flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood”, and especially on Das neue Laienbrevier des Haeckelismus (The new lay breviary of Haeckelism) by Moritz Reymond with cartoons by Fritz Steub. From the late 1870s these successful little books of verse introduced the Neapolitan discoveries that made the animal’s name and satirized Haeckel’s rise as high priest of its cult. One song is reproduced and translated here, with a contemporary “imitation” by the Canadian palaeontologist Edward John Chapman, and extracts from others. Predating the American “It’s a long way from amphioxus” by decades, these rhymes dramatize neglected ‘species politics’ of Darwinism and highlight the roles of humour in negotiating evolution.

A Marble Embryo: Meanings of a Portrait from 1900

Portraits of scientists use attributes of discovery to construct identities; portraits that include esoteric accessories may fashion identities for these too. A striking example is a marble bust of the anatomist Wilhelm His by the Leipzig sculptor Carl Seffner. Made in 1900, it depicts the founder of modern human embryology looking down at a model embryo in his right hand. This essay reconstructs the design and viewing of this remarkable portrait in order to shed light on private and public relations between scientists, research objects and audiences. The bust came out of a collaboration to model the face of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach and embodies a shared commitment to anatomical exactitude in three dimensions. His’s research agendas and public character explain the contemplative pose and unprecedented embryo model, which he had laboriously constructed from material a midwife supplied. The early contexts of display in the His home and art exhibitions suggest interpretive resources for viewers and hence likely meanings. Seffner’s work remains exceptional, but has affinities to portraits of human embryologists and embryos produced since 1960. Embryo images have acquired such controversial prominence that the model may engage us more strongly now than it did exhibition visitors around 1900.

Darwinism's Tragic Genius: Psychology and Reputation

The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was by far the most influential systematizer and propagandist of Darwinism, but we have long lacked a substantial, scholarly biography, even in German. In its absence, the fragmentary and problematic Anglophone literature has allowed to gain wide currency the caricature that Haeckel was a deviant Darwinian, scientifically insignificant but a forerunner of Nazi race hygiene, a forger, and a fraud.1 Most historians of German biology long ago made a fairer assessment, thanks especially to Paul Weindling’s work.2 But concerns linger, and Haeckel’s public image is dominated by negative stereotypes, especially in the United States. Robert Richards’s book attempts a major rehabilitation. Richards amply documents originality, productivity, and significance in support of the claim that “Haeckel was, undeniably, a scientific and even artistic genius” (p. 439). He also insists that, far from being the fount of some illegitimate hybrid of German idealism and evolutionism, Haeckel was an “authentic” Darwinian (p. 100)—indeed, Charles Darwin’s most important intellectual heir. Skeptics will doubtless reckon it easier to align

Immortality of a kind

Nick Hopwood In the flood of instant comment on cloning and stem cells, we need the longer and deeper views of cellular technologies that only history can provide. Historians of science have written much about the nineteenth-century advent of cell theory, but genes and molecules stole the limelight in the twentieth. We have a first-hand account of the history of somatic-cell genetics (The Cells of the Body by Henry Harris; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1995), a rich study of the adoption of the electron microscope (Nicolas Rasmussen’s Picture Control; Stanford University Press, 1997), and a philosophically driven interpretation of the rise of cell biology (Discovering Cell Mechanisms by William Bechtel; Cambridge University Press, 2006). But there has been no extended history of tissue culture — the technique, which underpins most biomedicine today, for growing vertebrate cells in the laboratory as if they were independent microorganisms. With five chapters tackling key episodes up to 1970, Culturing Life by Hannah Landecker is a small book that does much to fill that large gap. Landecker adopts a powerful approach from recent science studies: she takes routine practices of observation and manipulation very seriously indeed. This might sound dull, and not everyone would choose to spend years poring over methods sections and manuals. What converts base method into golden insight is the anthropologist’s eye for the strangeness, and thus the historical significance, of techniques that practitioners soon took for granted. Landecker identifies fascinating novelties in the autonomy, plasticity and time relations of cultured cells. She shows how, long before Dolly was born, such mundane technologies as flasks, tubes, nutrient media, freezers and culture collections created radically new and challenging forms of life. Tissue culture was pioneered in the early twentieth century by scientists frustrated with ‘fix, slice and stain’ histology and its obligatory detour via the cadaver. To solve difficult problems — the process of nerve outgrowth and the origin of the heartbeat — they learned from bacteriology how to culture living cells outside the body and so see them more directly. Observation was still highly mediated. Landecker reveals how time-lapse microcinematography made once-static entities move and change. The drive to manipulate cells in vitro was about distinguishing inherent limits from technical obstacles that could be overcome. Yes, cells could divide, it was soon shown, but for how long? Between the world wars, the FrenchAmerican surgeon Alexis Carrel sensationally claimed immortality. Wide audiences were told that, with enough food, his culture of chick embryo cells would grow larger than the Sun. He was believed, Landecker suggests, because his claim fit with a prevalent ideal of biological engineering. It would be interesting to go further and explore how, in the era of testicular transplants to restore the failing powers of rich old men, cellular immortality was bound up with the whole-organism biology of death, ageing and rejuvenation. Carrel was plausible because experiments were restricted to a few laboratories with their own distinctive cultures, in every sense. After the Second World War, the campaign to massproduce polio vaccine led to tissue culture being practised on a far larger scale and applied to the previously recalcitrant human cells. Techniques and reagents were standardized, and so, like other model organisms, were the cells. Freezing and clonal cultures promoted the distribution of established lines and liberated cells and researchers from the constraints of space and time. Life could now be started, stopped, stored, split and its different stages juxtaposed. With the finding that normal somatic cells can divide only a fixed number of times, Carrel’s claim of cellular immortality was rejected, but some cells and some people still achieved immortality of a kind. Landecker interprets the various stories about Henrietta Lacks — a black American who died of cervical cancer not knowing that her biopsy had been turned into the permanent HeLa cell line — as attempts to negotiate the paradoxes of personal identity in the biomedical age. Optimism in the 1950s about having a laboratory afterlife of service to science gave way in the late 1960s and 1970s to racially charged fears of contamination with these by then ubiquitous cells; now, bioethical tales of overdue recognition are dominant. Landecker brings out the Lacks stories’ obsession with ‘what she would weigh today’ — the unsettling Life in the lab: the ability to store and culture human cells led to the creation of the HeLa cell line. FI RE FL Y P RO D U C T IO N S/ C O RB IS

Walking on their ribs

ral. Biogeographers trace the spatiotemporal boundaries of species, discovering for example that catalpa trees are indigenous to the Wabash Valley. The other sorts of boundaries are conceptual and concern definitions. All triangles, and only triangles, have three sides. Although not all species reproduce sexually, those that do so produce a genealogical nexus, and species are chunks of it. At best, the way that characteristics are distributed is secondary to descent. In referring to species as the groupings that evolve by variation and selection, I do not mean to imply that this is the only way of defining species. Lots of people do it in lots of different ways, but Fernández-Armesto and Dunbar both introduce Darwin and evolution. So they need to be made aware of one quite prevalent way of construing species, including humans, especially as it provides rather a different perspective on the human species.FernándezArmesto devotes his final chapter to issues surrounding morality. Once again, as he sees it, the issue is characteristics. Which characteristics are relevant to morality, and which organisms exhibit them? What should we do with non-human organisms that have the characteristics that we use to confer moral rights? From the evolutionary perspective, however, the issue is genealogy, not distributions of characteristics. Even though some pigs may seem brighter than some people, pigs do not belong to the same chunk of the genealogical nexus as people. Evolutionary theory is inherently species-ist. If we discovered that dolphins have sufficiently welldeveloped language skills that we could strike up conversations with them, they would still be dolphins and we would still be humans. Social and moral problems would arise, but as biological species we would remain unique and distinct. ■ David L. Hull is emeritus professor at the Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208-1315, USA.