The way we were. The unborn and the foetus in History: between the images and the imaginary

Abstract

Since the sixteenth century pictures of unborn babies or of fetuses have been found in medical texts. If analyzed in a chronological sequence, these pictures testify a shift from an “affective” view of the shaping of life in the womb to a scientific “realistic” one. Long after Leonardo’s portrayed studies of fetuses were still fanciful; this was due to the fact that the only possible “study” on fetuses could be made on corpses. For many centuries, studying death in order to learn about life was in deep
contrast with the mentality of the time. Until the seventeenth century medical observation stopped short of the pregnant womb, thus honoring the secrecy that surrounded gestation. It was only in the eighteenth century that scientific thinking would separate the unborn child from the mother: for the first time fetuses are pictured against a white background rather than inside the womb. An unborn baby’s habitat is no more a maternal symbiosis but a book or an atlas where the fetus is presented as a species per se instead of an expected child.