When Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a medical student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she spent the autumn of 1901 constructing an anatomical model of a young human brain. Most accounts call it an “embryo” brain, although as we shall see it likely belonged to a fetus or infant. The assignment was her final opportunity to obtain the medical degree after failing four classes in the spring of her senior year. Her anatomy professor, Franklin Paine Mall (1982–1917), offered her a second chance to graduate if she would finish her brain model and write an accompanying manuscript. Stein eventually produced sixty-three drawings and “roughly twenty-five pages of text,” in addition to the model itself (Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 89).Footnote ¹ She submitted the work in January 1902, but Mall judged it as inept and threw it away. Stein set off for Europe, leaving medicine behind forever. She settled in Paris where she became an avant-garde writer most notably known for her book supposedly chronicling the life of Alice Babette Toklas (1877–1967), who was Stein's longtime lover, secretary, editor, cook, and companion. The book, published in 1933, narrated the life of the inimitable Gertrude Stein, although it was playfully titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Literary scholars have examined the effect of Stein's medical training on her narrative forms and themes as a way to pre-figure her later career and to analyze the relationship between science and artistic modernism (see Chodat Reference Chodat2005; Farland Reference Farland2004; Henderson Reference Henderson2004; Wineapple Reference Wineapple1996). This essay, by contrast, takes advantage of Stein's fame to read back into the historical constitution of embryos as social and scientific artifacts. It centers on the experiences of a medical student who happens to have been Gertrude Stein, but I make no pretense of contributing to Stein criticism or biography, nor do I claim any parallel between Stein's brain model and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein appears here because her fame ensured that her student experiences were documented and preserved. Other medical students undoubtedly faced similar challenges, but their papers were not similarly archived. Stein's experience allows us to examine the history of the cultural logics used to make sense of nascent human life (Conklin and Morgan Reference Conklin and Morgan1996; Morgan Reference Morgan2006). How do people come to understand what embryos and fetuses are and what they mean? How did embryo stories told by early-twentieth-century anatomists shape contemporary cultural ideologies about the beginnings of life? Stein's brain model was constructed at a time when positivist science was quickly coming to dominate middle-class notions of medicine and the body. The embryologists' biologically based accounts of “how we came to be” eventually became hegemonic, displacing other explanations based in religion or women's realms (Duden Reference Duden1993). The consequences of the embryological view are evident today in debates about frozen embryos and embryonic stem cells that should be traced to these early-twentieth-century embryo-producing efforts. Stein's embryo encounter offers useful lessons about how embryos—as scientific artifacts—came to be materialized, how that materiality was ascribed value, and how knowledge disputes were adjudicated.

This essay was inspired by the work of literary scholar Steven Meyer, whose 2001 book Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science is the most rigorous examination to date of how Stein's scientific work influenced her understanding of the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, concreteness and abstraction, and sense and nonsense. Meyer argues that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is intriguing precisely because it blurs the traditional boundaries between biographical subject, biographer, and biography (Meyer Reference Meyer1992; Reference Meyer2001). We can appreciate the ontology of the entity we call “embryo” in a similar way, not merely as a biological object or manifestation of natural fact, but as a cultural artifact that embodies the technologies that turn body into story, as Haraway put it (Reference Haraway1997: 179), the processes through which an embryo is materialized, and the stories told about it.

My research began with an ostensibly simple question about the age of Stein's specimen. Had she worked with an embryo specimen from the first eight weeks of development, as some accounts said, or with an older fetus or infant? The question proved impossible to answer. Neither Stein's model nor the accompanying manuscript have survived, and descriptions of the specimen in the correspondence were maddeningly contradictory. Each of Stein's professors and classmates, all trained embryologists and presumably capable of using technical terminology correctly, referred to the specimen differently. One called it an “embryo,” another a “seven-month fetus,” another a “new-born babe,” and one a “six-month-old child.” My inability to specify the nature of Stein's specimen resulted in a “defamiliarizing moment” (Knauft Reference Knauft2006: 408), when I realized that my quest was based on a theoretical assumption about the existence of an objective empirical truth that I otherwise disavowed.Footnote ² Cultural trappings are just that, and my efforts to clarify the confusion reflected my assumption that anatomical referents, including embryos, “should” (in cultural terms) map neatly onto anatomical objects. For at least the last fifty years, Americans have been taught to expect that embryologists' models and visual depictions are realistic accounts of developing human beings, a window to the womb (Duden Reference Duden, Morgan and Michaels1999; Michaels Reference Michaels, Morgan and Michaels1999). With that realization, my quest for empirical certainty began to seem less interesting as mission than as metaphor.

This paper uses Stein to explore how embryos are configured as natural and cultural artifacts. It aims to provoke in readers a similarly defamiliarizing moment by arguing that the embryos we “know” are not principally natural entities, nor is knowledge about them simply revealed through progressive empirical investigation (see Maienschein Reference Maienschein2003). Embryos as most Americans know them today are products of an era of scientific rationalism. They were produced in the very laboratories where Stein worked. Embryologists constructed the conceptual boundaries that separated (and continue to separate) three domains: (1) embryographical subjects (the embryos we see and imagine); (2) the embryographers (more commonly called “embryologists”) who produce descriptions, images, and culturally authorized accounts of embryos; and (3) embryographies, that is, the stories we tell ourselves about what kinds of entities embryos are, what they mean, and how to value them. These conceptual boundaries remain largely intact today, in part because embryo discourses tend to reinforce what Meyer calls the “stable equilibrium of subjectivity and objectivity” (Meyer Reference Meyer1992), that is, the supposed dichotomy that separates empirical embryos found in the laboratory from the fanciful or overtly politicized representations of them found in popular culture. To appropriate Meyer's analysis for a critique of embryo ontologies, we might say that a similar dichotomy produced embryos while it made the work of producing them—the collecting of specimens, fixing, sectioning, and model making—seem to vanish. The boundaries between embryo as subject, embryologist as author, and embryological origin stories constitute the conceptual architecture of our embryological worldview. Embryos (as subjects) were constructed by embryologists (as authors and artists) who favored empiricism and rejected non-empirical ways of knowing embryos (as their narrative convention).

Interrogating these boundaries can lend insight into “the triumph of the embryological view of life” (Hopwood Reference Hopwood2000: 32) and show how cultural interpretations continue to dominate our views of embryo ontologies. Ever since the nineteenth century, embryos have been regarded as entities founded in biology, produced inside bodies (and also, more recently, in fertility clinics and laboratories), and interpreted best by scientists. Embryos still tend to be regarded as natural rather than cultural objects. A reflexive alternative to this view is articulated by developmental biologist Scott Gilbert, who analyzes images of embryos used by anti-abortion activists to illustrate the importance of context in shaping representations of embryos and fetuses (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2006). The hegemony of the non-reflexive view complicates our ability to apply cultural critique to embryos, and plenty of philosophers work on the assumption that definitional disputes over embryo and fetal status can be resolved with airtight logic rather than by understanding the constitutive character of the disputes, that is, the cultural and historical contexts within which embryos are ontologically fashioned, ascribed value, and adjudicated (Khushf Reference Khushf2006). The blurring of boundaries proposed in this essay can prove theoretically useful in understanding the discursive constitution of disputes—such as those concerning abortion, stem cells, cloning, and fetal tissue research—that hinge on contested definitions of embryos, pre-embryos, and other epistemologically slippery creatures (see American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 2002; Biggers Reference Biggers1990; Maienschein Reference Maienschein2002; Mahowald Reference Mahowald2003; Mulkay Reference Mulkay1997).

This essay is organized into four sections. The first sets the stage at the Johns Hopkins Medical School anatomy laboratories, the headquarters for human embryology in the early twentieth century. The second section examines conflicting accounts of Gertrude Stein's model-building effort to illuminate inconsistencies in the anatomists' accounts, and the third section analyzes the rationale behind Mall's decision to reject Stein's model. The final section considers scientists' reasons for distancing themselves from Stein after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. They used Stein's “nonsensical” prose as an ex post facto justification for her medical school failure and congratulated themselves on their ability to recognize the epistemological boundary—between objective science and subjective fiction—that they were simultaneously enacting. This essay argues that embryos are better understood—like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—as collaboratively constituted artifacts, formed by the intersections of object, author, and story.

Human Embryology at Johns Hopkins

When Stein started medical school in 1897, the Johns Hopkins Medical School had been open for just four years. The anatomy department, under Mall's direction, faced the enormous responsibility to build and equip new laboratories, acquire sufficient cadavers for dissection, and put anatomy onto a dignified professional footing (Sabin Reference Sabin1934a). In addition to his teaching and administrative duties, Mall nourished the passion for human embryology that he had acquired in Germany under the tutelage of anatomist Wilhelm His (1831–1904). His had invented the microtome (used for slicing anatomical sections), developed the science of histogenesis (studying the embryological origins of organs), and perfected techniques for collecting and sectioning human embryos and fetuses. Mall was enthused by His' techniques, which would allow researchers to study the anatomy of tiny human embryo specimens (Hopwood Reference Hopwood1999). He had little time to pursue his passion in the late 1890s, but by 1913 he had acquired a personal collection of one thousand human embryo specimens and persuaded the Carnegie Institution of Washington to finance a Department of Embryology. The Carnegie Collection of Embryology became the most renowned collection of human embryological specimens in the world; it is housed today with other embryological collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

“In the nineteenth century,” notes historian Nick Hopwood, “embryology was a central science of life” (Reference Hopwood, de Chadarevian, Hopwood and de Chadarevian2004: 170; see also Coleman Reference Coleman1971: 36). Mall was convinced that the life sciences would be well served by careful documentation of the earliest stages of human embryological development, then largely unknown. Like the many comparative anatomists he knew—that “host of young Darwinists sectioning their way through the animal kingdom” (Hopwood Reference Hopwood, Hopwood and de Chadarevian2004: 186)—Mall regarded human embryos as a species of “natural” objects. For that reason, he had no moral reservations about collecting and sectioning human embryos. On the contrary, he argued that embryological research could “establish certain points of great value to medicine and to the race” (Mall Reference Mall1911: 345). Mall was sure that clinical medicine would be served by embryology's insights into “physiology, teratology, and pathology” (Reference Mall1911: 347). Embryology would shed light on the causes of birth defects, miscarriage, molar and tubal pregnancies, the consequences of venereal disease, and other anomalies of pregnancy (Reference Mall1911: 345), some of which might eventually be “eliminated altogether,” Mall hinted, as a result of embryological research (Reference Mall1911: 345). These were ambitious goals that could be met only by collecting and analyzing large numbers of human embryo specimens.

From the anthropologist's perspective, the emergence of the embryo presupposed the conversion of unspecified matter into a specimen (see Hopwood Reference Hopwood2000: 40). Scientists specified the steps to be taken. Embryos first had to be acquired from clinical colleagues who got them from women who had a spontaneous or induced abortion, a hysterectomy, or who died while pregnant. Once a specimen reached the laboratory, its story was untethered from its biological and social origins. Embryos exist unto themselves, interpretable without reference to pregnant women or other encumbering social circumstances. As Hopwood points out, “‘freeing’ embryos of their means of connection to the pregnant woman created the persistent illusion that they develop by themselves” (Reference Hopwood2000: 42). Materializing the specimens required that each be assigned a number, measured, and classified according to the medium in which it was measured (alcohol, formalin, or fresh), the type of stain and counter-stain used, the number and thickness of sections, the direction of section (transverse, saggital, or coronal), and the condition of preservation (excellent, good, fair, or poor). Whenever possible, specimens were then fixed, embedded in paraffin, and sliced into serial sections to be mounted on slides. Later, medical illustrators and modelers would draw pictures and make oversized models depicting anatomical features, and embryologists would write scientific papers describing what they found. These techniques constituted the very embryos that embryologists claimed to study (Clarke Reference Clarke and Geison1987; Reference Clarke1998; Hopwood Reference Hopwood1999; Reference Hopwood2000; Reference Hopwood2002; Reference Hopwood2006).

Mall accepted virtually every specimen he was offered, although many of the specimens he received were worthless. They were too large to be of interest, macerated by having remained dead too long in the womb, distorted by being preserved in the wrong chemical solutions, or squashed into receptacles that were too small. In 1891 he lamented, “It frequently happens that human embryos which come into my possession are almost ruined by the physician's carelessness in preserving the material” (Mall 1891: 1144; see also Hopwood Reference Hopwood2000: 49). Nearly two decades later, he regretted that only about half of the 300 existing sectioned, mounted specimens in the United States were “well preserved” (Mall Reference Mall1910: 355). Yet Mall had several reasons to hold onto even worthless specimens, because the microtome provided just one measure of the worth of a dead embryo. By accepting even useless specimens, Mall respected the goodwill of the doctor who provided the gift, in hopes that future donations might be fresher or better preserved. Furthermore, even if a specimen were not fit for sectioning, it could serve as part of a series, be dissected by medical students, or be given to a lesser institution and thus initiate a chain of exchange that would enhance Mall's prestige (Anderson Reference Anderson2000). Every additional specimen in Mall's steadily growing collection was a feather in his cap, evidence that he was what anthropologists might call a “big man” who possessed the power to accumulate wealth in the form of embryo specimens. This status was useful as Mall sought foundation funding for an embryological institute (Mall Reference Mall1911).

Gertrude Stein's Brain ModelFootnote ³

The popularity of embryology meant that Gertrude Stein had been exposed to the field before she entered Mall's laboratory. She took her first embryology course in college at Radcliffe in the 1890s, followed by an advanced vertebrate embryology course at Woods Hole in the summer of 1897 (Wineapple Reference Wineapple1996: 105).Footnote ⁴ After spending the summer collecting marine embryos and surrounded by illustrious embryologists (including Frank R. Lillie and Charles Otis Whitman), Stein moved to Baltimore to study medicine.

Among her first courses in medical school was anatomy with Mall. Brenda Wineapple writes that Stein “delighted in Doctor Mall” that first year at Johns Hopkins. She extolled his dry wit and praised his hands-off teaching style. She “disdained learning by rote, valuing only the ‘self-inspired,’ as she called it, the creative and original work that [...] was not necessarily rewarded outside Mall's laboratory” (1996: 125). Mall, in turn, appeared to appreciate Stein. In contrast to other Johns Hopkins professors, Mall was known for supporting female students. Mall and Stein were both children of German immigrants, and Stein's independent mind and spirit were well suited to Mall's notoriously vague, laissez-faire teaching style. Mall believed neither in lecturing nor in examinations; he preferred to let students work independently and learn inductively. Mall gave Stein the highest grade she received in medical school (Schoenberg Reference Schoenberg1988: 251).

When literary scholars and historians describe Stein's anatomical modeling work, they often begin with the account she provided in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “The first two years of medical school were alright,” Stein wrote. “They were purely laboratory work and Gertrude Stein under Llewelys [sic] Barker immediately betook herself to research work. She began a study of all the brain tracts, the beginning of a comparative study” (Reference Stein1933: 99). Stein's work had been assigned by Lewellys Franklin Barker (1867–1943), Mall's new assistant. Barker, who was described as a determined, good-looking man, had just returned from a research expedition to India, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines. He lost no time recruiting students to do the grunt work for an ambitious neurology treatise he was compiling; the “study of all the brain tracts” to which Stein refers was in fact Barker's project. It required many detailed histological accounts of the central nervous system, in other words, many dissected brains. Accurate models were indispensable to understanding anatomical structures in three dimensions, and a talented model maker was a valued member of any anatomy department (Hopwood Reference Hopwood1999).Footnote ⁵ Because Stein was studying brain anatomy and physiology and because modeling was considered “an ideal exercise for a junior researcher” (Hopwood Reference Hopwood2002: 59), Stein was a logical choice as a research assistant. Barker assigned her the task of modeling a little-known region of the brain called the nucleus of Darkschewitsch,Footnote ⁶ which required that she section and stain a brain and describe the anatomical structure. Barker appreciated Stein's work and gave it a couple of pages in his mammoth 1899 volume, The Nervous System and Its Constituent Neurones (see Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 75–79; Barker Reference Barker1942: 60–61). This single citation provided the basis for Stein to boast, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, that she had developed a “reputation for original scientific work” (Reference Stein1933: 101).

It is important at this juncture to introduce Florence Rena Sabin (1871–1953), a classmate of Stein's at Johns Hopkins. Sabin was three years older than Stein and a year ahead of her in medical school. They were acquaintances, thrown together with the other female students, yet their medical careers took different paths. Sabin was a talented embryological anatomist “who is credited with discovering that the lymphatic vessels arise from endothelial budding from embryonic veins—a discovery that was confirmed only as late as 1999.”Footnote ⁷ While in medical school, Sabin made a highly celebrated brain model and went on to become a pioneering medical scientist, while Stein bungled her brain model and left Johns Hopkins in disgrace. Sabin had an aptitude for anatomical investigation. Playfully dubbed “Flossie” (reportedly because she was “the least flossy of any dame ever created”),Footnote ⁸ she was modest, meticulous, and loyal. In 1900, Sabin's “A Model of the Medulla Oblongata, Pons, and Midbrain of a New-Born Babe,” was published to wide acclaim at Johns Hopkins (Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 86). The eminent German anatomical modeler, Friedrich Ziegler, agreed to construct intricate wax models of the brain to accompany the atlas (see Hopwood Reference Hopwood2002).Footnote ⁹ He invited Sabin to spend seven weeks in Freiburg, Germany, to supervise his work and answer his questions. Barker wrote to compliment Sabin on the book: “It is really very fine, and [Henry McElderry] Knower [who edited Sabin's text] has been happy in the arrangement. We were all delighted here to learn that Ziegler is to reproduce the model at [Philipp] Stohr's suggestion. I think you will be surprised at the wide distribution it will gain when it is once reproduced” (Barker Reference Barker1901; see also Hopwood Reference Hopwood2002: 61).Footnote ¹⁰ Sabin returned to Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1901, where her medical career continued to thrive. In October, Mall—normally taciturn and thrifty with his praise—wrote to Barker, “Miss Sabin's work is progressing in a brilliant way.” The following year, on the basis of her “reputation for original scientific work,” Sabin became the first woman appointed to the Johns Hopkins medical faculty. She was a lifelong friend to Mall's wife, the first woman president of the American Anatomical Association, and the first woman to become a lifetime member of the National Academy of Science. She quickly established herself as Mall's protégé, and the success of her model motivated Mall to assign Stein a similar project.

While Sabin's career was soaring, Stein's grades had begun to slide. In spring 1901, Stein was not permitted to graduate with her class.Footnote ¹¹ In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein pretends to be unscathed by the failure and to have done nothing to reverse the decision: “The professor who had flunked her asked her to come to see him. She did. He said, of course Miss Stein all you have to do is to take a summer course here and in the fall naturally you will take your degree” (Reference Stein1933: 101–2). She says she told the professor that she was bored with medicine and relieved to be done with it, but does not mention that Mall offered her the chance to graduate if she would return to Baltimore in the fall to make a model of a young human brain. Mall explained the agreement to Barker (who had left in June 1900 to take a position at the University of Chicago) in August: “Miss Stein failed to graduate with us last June. She comes up again next Feb. After that I will do all in my power to make her round out her work started with you. She is you know difficult to manage as she has the [weakness] to [bite] off continually more than she can [swallow]” (quoted in Wineapple Reference Wineapple1996: 144). By the time that letter was written, Stein had taken off to spend the summer of 1901 in Europe.

Stein returned reluctantly to Baltimore in October, humiliated. The recollections of Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, a classmate of Sabin's, have been a key source of insight into what happened that autumn.

Mendenhall's account, it should be remembered, was written approximately forty years after the events transpired and well after Stein's reputation had been established.

Correspondence between Sabin and her medical school classmate, Joseph Marshall Flint (1872–1944), provides an additional account—what Sabin confidently calls “the true story”—of Stein's embryo research. Flint had started medical school at Johns Hopkins in 1896, the year before Stein was admitted.Footnote ¹³ He left Baltimore in 1901 to direct the new anatomy department at Berkeley, and so did not witness Stein's debacle. Sabin and Flint renewed their acquaintanceship in 1932 when Sabin wrote to ask his recollections for a biography she was writing of Mall. Flint, then sixty years old and living in Paris, returned a long, friendly letter. The two had established an active correspondence, in reminiscing mode, by the time The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in September 1933. An incredulous Flint sent Sabin a clipping, presumably an excerpt of the book that had appeared in The Atlantic Monthly: “My dear Dr. Sabin: Have you seen the enclosed? What is it? Perhaps evidence that, after all, G. S. does react to the subconscious! Or, is it a defense reaction in appropriating your experience and that of Evans to explain a failure in Medicine? Curious person. She has contributed much to the bunk of the postwar decades, but this autobiography is well written. Critics say, ‘only posterity can explain her.’ I rather fancy, as in the case of Joyce, posterity will never take the trouble” (Flint Reference Flint1933a). Flint did not realize that posterity would indeed linger over these opaque writers and brain-twisters or that James Joyce and Gertrude Stein would be much more famous, seventy-five years later, than either Florence Sabin or Franklin Mall. In hindsight we might say that Flint's vision of the future was even more fanciful than Stein's vision of the past.

Sabin responded a few weeks later, making it clear that she was more preoccupied with her biography of Mall's life than with Stein's latest book. Nevertheless, she had taken the time to consult a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and said she wanted to set the record straight:

When Sabin wrote, “as you know, I had had a little experience in the subject,” she was being disingenuous. She knew full well that as author of the definitive brain atlas and judge of Stein's work, she herself had been in the position, as Meyer observes, to “set the standard against which it was judged” (Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 85). Flint, obviously feeling that Sabin had given him license to gossip, responded:

Sabin's curiosity had been piqued. When Stein gave a reading in New York in 1934, Sabin was in the audience. This was Stein's first trip to the United States—and the first time in thirty years that she would be seeing Sabin. After the reading, Sabin approached the podium to greet her former schoolmate and invite her to dinner. But Stein declined, pleading fatigue at the end of a grueling tour. That was their final meeting (Sabin Reference Sabin1934b). Sabin, ever discrete, never commented publicly about Stein's medical school fiasco. The incident is not mentioned in her biography of Mall and she remained reluctant to discuss it for the record even after Stein's death. In 1947, Sabin received a query from James Montrose Duncan Olmsted, professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who was collecting materials for a never-published article about Stein's medical career (judging by the letters he solicited from a variety of Stein's contemporaries cited in Wineapple Reference Wineapple1996; also Wineapple personal communication 2003). Sabin, by then seventy-six years old, responded reluctantly, saying she did not wish to be quoted. The pertinent portion of the letter, since reproduced in Wineapple's biography (Reference Wineapple1996: 150), reads as follows:

Sabin, who wanted to convey a charitable impression, gave Stein the benefit of the doubt: “Of course she must have known that she never saw a reprint of the work, but I do not know whether she was ever notified or not. My guess is not and I judge that she was entirely sincere in her statement in her autobiography that it was published. She just assumed that it must have been published and must have been good” (Sabin Reference Sabin1947).

Rejecting Stein's Model

Sabin's letter passes lightly over an astonishing revelation: Mall asked for her help because he could not make sense of the paper or model himself; in other words, her anatomical model was too confusing for this premier anatomy professor to interpret. When Sabin explained that Stein had badly distorted the specimen and bent it out of shape before it was fixed and sectioned, Mall must have been terribly offended. Stein's model was an insult to the intellectual endeavor that defined his life.Footnote ¹⁶ He probably had not considered that the assignment was designed to bring out the worst in Stein. After all, she had admitted she could not draw (Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 93), and her classmates repeatedly characterized her as “sloppy” (see Wineapple Reference Wineapple1996: 124–25).Footnote ¹⁷ Barker reported that Mall had “contempt for slovenly or dishonest work” (Sabin Reference Sabin1934a: 139), and Sabin recalled, “A student who did poor and careless work irritated him” (Reference Sabin1934a: 173). Yet in Mall's view, lack of artistic talent would not excuse a student from the obligation to produce an accurate model. Stein had broken this cardinal rule by not ensuring that the brain was properly positioned before she fixed the specimen. All the subsequent work—fixing, sectioning, building the model, writing a paper—had been wasted. At stake was nothing less than the integrity of anatomy as a profession.

Hopwood's work on embryological model making demonstrates the centrality of three-dimensional models in nineteenth-century anatomy (Hopwood and Chadarevian Reference Hopwood, Hopwood and de Chadarevian2004). This was especially true in embryology because most students would not have been able to conjure up a mental image of a human embryo (Hopwood Reference Hopwood, Hopwood and de Chadarevian2004: 182). By “giving body” to embryos, the embryologists made it possible for students and researchers to perceive embryos in unprecedented ways (Hopwood Reference Hopwood1999). In this sense, the embryo models constituted the very objects that embryologists claimed to study (Hopwood Reference Hopwood, Hopwood and de Chadarevian2004: 171; see also Reference Hopwood1999; Reference Hopwood2000; Reference Hopwood2002). The models logically reflected the interests and worldviews of the modelers. Embryo models should mimic nature (Hopwood and Chadarevian 2004: 1); they should render faithfully what an embryologist might expect to see inside a normal physical specimen, because little could be known by examining external form. Yet, until Wilhelm His, scientists had been loathe to dissect, and hence destroy, rare existing specimens of early human embryos (Hopwood Reference Hopwood2000: 39). In Mall's words, “The advancement of embryology has shown that it is necessary to destroy, or rather to lay into sections, the embryos before they can be studied properly” (Reference Mall1891: 1145). “Proper” embryological inquiry required an anatomist to ruin the embryo's anatomical integrity. In other words, the embryologists-qua-investigators were also embryographers-qua-story tellers, extolling the importance of anatomy in determining what is most real.

Contemporary embryo ideologies tend to assume a tight correspondence between embryos as scientific objects and realistic representations of them. The embryologists’ scientific legitimacy is predicated, in part, on producing accurate renditions of embryos. But how is “accuracy” defined (see Hopwood Reference Hopwood2006)? Embryographical subjects were designed to be indistinguishable from the scientific practices and visual techniques used to depict them. This was an ontological stance that required material embryo to be identical to textual and visual descriptions of them. Sabin explained her brain model by saying, “such a reconstruction would not only show graphically for the first time the form and relations of the tracts and nuclei, but that it would simplify for the student of anatomy a region both complex and difficult” (Reference Sabin1901: 7). This understanding can be unpacked by considering alternative visions of accuracy. Imagine, for a moment, that embryologists had been steeped in feminist theory rather than anatomy. Would they have built models that depicted embryos as separate from women's bodies or from the social (and sexual) circumstances in which they were produced (see Morgan Reference Morgan2004)? The embryo models produced in Mall's laboratory paradoxically rooted embryos in an anatomical basis while detaching them from the anatomical relationships that linked them to particular wombs and women (Gilbert and Howes-Mischel Reference Gilbert and Howes-Mischel2004; see also Gilbert and Faber Reference Gilbert, Faber and Tauber1996). Anatomically correct models were embedded in epistemological premises that hid the social relations that (also) produce embryos; the resulting embryographies thus have to be seen as a product of the embryologists' narrative conventions, epistemological assumptions, and laboratory practices.

I do not mean to suggest that the embryologists should be faulted for constituting embryonic and fetal subjects that correspond to specific scientific enterprises. An assessment of “what it takes for images to count as proper representations” has to take account of the purposes for which they are constituted and how they are “trafficked between esoteric and exoteric circles of science” (Hopwood Reference Hopwood2006: 262). The scientist's goals are different from those of the artist. Embryologists needed to create stable, accurate understandings of embryos that were and still are useful for the purposes of anatomy, descriptive morphology, and medical science. My point is simply to locate embryologists as authors of particular kinds of embryo stories. Like all authors, they fashion their protagonists in ways that suit their goals. This is no less true of embryologists than it is of other embryographers. If the goal is to sell 3D/4D prenatal imaging services, for example, an embryographer might set up a website called “preciousbabyimaging.com,” under the banner, “The miracle of tomorrow—today!” If the goal is to oppose abortion, he or she might set up a website to feature gruesome dismembered fetuses as an “abortion gallery,” sponsored by “Missionaries to the Unborn.” Each of these examples claims to depict an objectively true (that is, unauthored) story. To the extent that embryo stories are cosmological origin myths, narrating us into existence, Janet Malcolm's insight into The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas might be applied also to embryology: Stein “brilliantly solved the koan of autobiography, by disclaiming responsibility for the one being written” (Reference Malcolm2003: 61). As with Stein's model, today's embryo disputes are likewise imbued with historical practices of materialization, ascription of value, and adjudication.

Embryologists were scientific partisans, as evidenced by the embryographical subjects they produced. Yet even as they showed their allegiance to anatomy, their decisions about how to depict embryos were based on subjective and non-scientific contexts and assumptions (see Hopwood Reference Hopwood2000; Reference Hopwood2002; Reference Hopwood2005; Reference Hopwood2006). The embryologists were discrete or perhaps even unconscious of their biases, but their correspondence offers occasional glimpses into their cultural presuppositions and aesthetic preferences. In 1919, for example, the anatomist Charles R. Bardeen wrote to George L. Corner, then Director of the Carnegie Institution Department of Embryology, to ask that the illustrations for a forthcoming anatomy textbook be altered: “I should like to have the infant suggest a nice coat of fat, the boy and especially the youth lengthening bones, the young man muscle and the old man bones fat and tendons. I have purposely left off the external genitalia in order to reveal the height of the crotch.” Inserting a caret, he scribbled, “And see I have left off the young lady. Give her beauty” (Bardeen Reference Bardeen1919).

Producing Sense and Nonsense

Stein's former professors and other scientists were quick to distance themselves from Stein and her “nonsense” after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 52). While Stein's reputation soared along with sales of the book, her former colleagues disdainfully dismissed her. Flint wrote to Sabin, “She accepts vague nonsense in lieu of concrete thoughts and ideas.” In a similar vein, Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, pulled the physician's trump card by proposing in 1934 that Gertrude Stein might in fact be ill. He suggested she might suffer from a medical condition called palilalia, an aftereffect of encephalitis that would cause her to repeat phrases (see Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 50–54). When it was proposed that Stein should lecture at Yale during her 1933–1934 tour of the United States, the respected experimental embryologist Ross G. Harrison (Johns Hopkins 1894) huffishly told his colleagues, “I am not in favor of spending any money on Miss Stein. You could hire somebody for five dollars to recite a few words to an audience for an hour or so and it would probably be just as edifying. I am probably the only one on the University faculty to have the distinction of having been one of Miss Stein's teachers. She was a medical student at Johns Hopkins in my day there and I knew her quite well. She was just an ordinary student and I cannot believe that she has since become a genius.” Harrison added that he “should not care to be held responsible, even in a small degree, for her present vagaries” (Reference Harrison1934). Barker, writing in a more playful vein in his 1942 memoir, mused about whether he might be responsible for Stein's vagaries: “I have often wondered whether my attempts to teach [Gertrude Stein] the intricacies of the medulla oblongata had anything to do with the development of the strange literary forms with which she was later to perplex the world” (1942: 60). The scientists criticized Stein for nonsensical writing and brain twisting (both literal and metaphorical), touting their empiricism while ignoring the interpretive difficulties inherent in their own anatomical work.

Some of the embryologists' interpretive difficulties had to do with separating normal from abnormal variations among the diverse specimens they encountered. Hopwood points out that although embryologists collected their materials from different sources, by “treating them all in the same way” they “homogenize[d] the meaning of the objects” and “made them physically equivalent” (2000: 40). Homogenization was necessary to construct a set of normal plates or Normentafel, the history of which has been written by Hopwood Reference Hopwood(2005). For our purposes, it is important to note that the standardized embryological series were an important tool for embryologists who needed to stage and compare specimens. Yet the cultural effect was to blur individual variations among embryos and thus to perpetuate the notion that “embryo” could be regarded as a generic, undifferentiated object, a symbol of common human origins, rather than as a specific, contingent, socially contextualized subject.

There is nothing easy about interpreting or communicating embryo morphology. Even specialists sometimes have a hard time understanding one another. Sabin had been dispatched to Freiburg in 1901 because Ziegler could not interpret her model—even accompanied by a carefully prepared text and exceptionally intricate drawings by the renowned illustrator Max Bröedel—well enough to replicate it in wax. When she arrived to guide Ziegler, he had insisted that they reconstruct the fiber bundles of the brain because “he could not visualize the structure sufficiently clearly from the Hopkin's artist's perspectival drawings” (Hopwood Reference Hopwood2002: 61). Meyer points out that anatomists have long disagreed over the identity and interpretation of the nucleus of Darkschewitsch, the function of which remains unknown a century later (Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 78, 347–48, notes 23–25). The principals in the Stein controversy tried to reconcile conflicting accounts of that “puzzling” region of the brain (Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 77–78), but their models by definition exemplified anatomical concreteness rather than uncertainty, with an authority that is rarely questioned.Footnote ¹⁸ When the embryologists criticized Stein for her avant-garde abstraction and experimentalism, they discursively widened the gap between her work and their own, and positioned themselves as radical empiricists at the other end of the spectrum between objectivity and subjectivity. Mall and his colleagues attempted to secure their own epistemic authority by establishing the ontological determinacy of anatomical material, including the particular clumps of matter that we came to understand as “ourselves unborn” (Corner 1944).Footnote ¹⁹

It was not Stein's view, says Meyer, “that objectivity and subjectivity can never be distinguished, only that sometimes they cannot be” (1992, my emphasis). Some literary scholars argue that Stein resisted the microscopic precision and linear narrative forms demanded by anatomical science and therefore deliberately refused to make an accurate brain model (see Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 92). But this interpretation overdraws the distinction between scientific factuality and Stein's “vagaries.” Stein's mis-folded model—her own anatomical “composition”—was illegible to Mall and took several nights for Sabin to decipher; in other words, anatomy was rarely as clear or concrete as its practitioners liked to think or claim.Footnote ²⁰ Embryo models, like Stein's notoriously abstruse prose, “do not try to reproduce an already-existent reality” as much as they “create the reality of their own making” (Wineapple Reference Wineapple2002). As Stein explained her decision to build the model in a messy, typo-ridden letter to Barker, “I hadso muchdifficulty in understanding the conditions from the text books that I felt such/a clarifming process to be much needed. Not that the books do not all tell the truth as I know it but that they tell so muchmore than one is confused” (Stein n.d.) Conditions were difficult, textbooks were confusing, anatomists themselves were vague, elliptical, and every bit as “strange and bizarre” as the obscure and experimental verse for which Stein later became known.

Did Gertrude Stein work with the brain of an embryo, fetus, or infant? I cannot say. But the inquiry inspired me to look at the embryographers who produce “true stories” about embryos. Their ideological assumptions and practices of materialization are significant, because they provide the foundation for contemporary embryographies that more often position embryos as concrete, natural entities than as cultural artifacts shaped by different kinds of storytellers with varying and unstable degrees of authority. Stein's brain modeling episode helps to clarify the processes through which embryologists, working with Progressive-era social and scientific assumptions, designed the bodily appropriations, laboratory techniques, visualization methods, and epistemological framing that would materialize the entities we now call “embryos.” Perhaps most remarkable was their ability to naturalize embryos, to represent them as asocial entities “discovered” in the inner recesses of the body and to “forget the conditions, apparatuses, and histories of [their] production” (Haraway Reference Haraway1997: 182). In the end, I found myself identifying, quite improbably, with Stein's own untidy assessment of her modeling work: “I havebeen able I have endeavored to expres/a very clear image which exists in my own mind of a region which the existing literature of the subject leaves in a hopeless mess … my aim in writing this article has been not so much to give/new/matter but to make crnfusion clear” (Stein n.d.; repr. in Meyer Reference Meyer2001: 94–95). Stein did indeed make a great contribution to embryology, but it had nothing to do with the murky nucleus of Darkschewitsch or other “new/matter” of embryological anatomy. By subverting what “authorship” means, Stein clarified the presuppositions and conditions that allowed embryos to be conjured into social being. She made confusion clear.