Most people are not eager to have images of folks with elephantiasis or who are conjoined twins hanging on the walls of their home or in their album of valued views.
Not too surprising, then, that many of those images have not survived the ravages of time.
That’s why Prodigies and Marvels, a collection of rare prints from the 16th to the 19th century showing such anomalies, is such a treat.
If you’re curious about this kind of thing — whether, for example, conjoined twins who share a single heart were considered by church authorities to have two separate souls, or if abnormal births were seized upon as bad omens — 15 such challenging images fill the corridor of the Sterling Hall of Medicine on Cedar Street. They come from the Yale Medical Library’s collection of 3,000 medical prints and posters.
A companion exhibition of illustrated medical books called “Teratology: The Science and History of Human Monstrosity” is in the adjacent rotunda of the building, tracing the evolution of the scientific study of abnormal humans.
Yale Medical Library
The exhibitions, which both run through May 15, were percolating at the time of Side Show, the Yale School of Art’s recent exhibition about the Cony-Island style freak show phenomenon, said Susan Wheeler (pictured below), one of the medical librarians who curated the exhibition.
In her labels, she has gathered fascinating facts that reveal key differences between how these individuals were viewed across time, from the 18th century versus in our latter day Cony Island freak shows. The woman with elephantiasis pictured above, for example, is not on a stage or being gawked at. She is wearing fancy clothes, daintily raising the hem of her dress to reveal her enlarged limb.
The caption beneath the print, an 18th century engraving by an unknown artist, further reveals that the woman is widely traveled and speaks several languages. The impression is that if you want to see her, you might need to make an appointment.
In the early days of fascination with such phenomena, abnormalities were often put to political or religious purposes. Varying sides would point to conjoined twins or strange limbs as they did to comets: omens, some good and some bad. Over time abnormal births grew to have less cosmic significance, and became looked upon as strange or even repugnant, paving the way for freak shows.
“Fishboy,” artist unknown.
A lot of critical thinking –– some of it very misled –– happened in between that then and now, the show explains. This was due in part to the church, which used these phenomena as an opportunity to weigh in on issues pertaining to child-rearing practices as well as theology. In the image above, a 1689 German woodcut that Wheeler calls “Fishboy,” the subject has ichthyosis, a genetic skin disorder that is shown as fish scales all over the body.
“The text describes how the disease is attributed to prenatal influences — his mother observed sea creatures during her pregnancy, and these are illustrated in the background,” reads Wheeler’s label. The broadsheet was officially approved by the church and distributed widely.
The 17th century public was also fascinated by Lazarus and Joannes Colloredo, conjoined twins from Verona who received a double christening and were recognized as two separate men although they shared one functioning heart. Captured in this 1646 engraving, the label paraphrases the text below the image: “A Genoa physician who observed the twins remarked that when one child drank, milk dripped out of the mouth of the other.”
Let not the viewer feel that all this primitive science and gawking is a thing of the past, though. In the second to last display case in the rotunda, we confront “the contribution of the pharmaceutical industry to birth defects.”
Allan Appel Photo
Beneath a Life magazine photograph of Dr. Frances Kelsey, the courageous Food and Drug Administration scientist whose research led to its banning in the U.S., thalidomide‘s effects are evident in a harrowing photograph of a two-year-old German baby. Her mother took the eponymous sleeping pill, which was widely distributed in Europe.
The caption to the photograph reads: “Though she wears a harness and prosthetic arms, this German girl, not yet two, is unaware she is not like the rest of life she sees. She feels love, she remembers food, she laughs, she cries, she lives.”
On your way in to these two exhibitions you also pass through a third mini-show in the foyer of the Medical Library: “100 Years of Public Health at Yale.”
Although all the exhibitions are open to the public, you do need to show i.d. to the security folks on entering. It’s worth the trouble.
Both the “Teratology” and the public health displays were curated by Courtney Thompson, a doctoral candidate in the history of science and medicine and Melissa Grafe, another of the university’s medical librarians.
