Lynn M. Morgan
Icons of Life
A Cultural History of Human Embryos

$55.00, £37.95 hardcover
9780520260436

$21.95, £14.95 paperback
9780520260443

328 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 13 b/w photographs
September 2009, Available worldwide
 
Icons of Life tells the engrossing and provocative story of an early
twentieth-century undertaking, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's
project to collect thousands of embryos for scientific study. Lynn M.
Morgan blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history
of specimen collecting. In the process, she illuminates how a
hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's
fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo
collecting project-which she follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy
department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to
China-most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the
1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of "ourselves unborn,"
and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we
came to be. Morgan explains how dead specimens paradoxically became
icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate
from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical
career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, Morgan
sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still
controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean.

For more information, see http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11156.php

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