Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine by Sandra Cavallo & David Gentilcore

Author:Sandra Cavallo & David Gentilcore [Cavallo, Sandra & Gentilcore, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Modern, Italy, History of Medicine - Italy, Medical, Medicine - Italy - History, History; Modern 1601-, 18th Century, Medicine, History of Medicine, History; Modern 1601- - Italy, Professional Role - Italy, History
ISBN: 9781405180405
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
Published: 2008-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Women, wax and anatomy

61

portraits of the ancestors played a part in perpetuating family resemblance, because they affected the imagination of the mother and thus contributed to the child having some of the physical characteristics of its forbears.39

Being a supporter of ovist preformism, Vallisneri attributed a central role to the maternal body in the generation of offspring. As the head of the Paduan Accademia dei Ricoverati, in 1723 he came out in support of noble and talented women in the debate that was aimed at appraising the legitimacy of women’s access to education and the study of the sciences and the liberal arts.40 Vallisneri’s defence of women’s learning may perhaps be read against his views of the centrality of the maternal body in generation. Notably, the debate on the place of women in the arenas of knowledge, which he initiated at the Paduan Academy, was followed by a season during which women like Bassi and Morandi participated in the realm of natural inquiry. In this period, many continued to endorse the view that maternal imagination had the capacity to affect the body of the unborn child, in spite of the growing sense of uncertainty about its workings.

Views of maternal imagination were still current in the medical environment in which Morandi operated as an anatomist and a wax-modeller.41 In 1751, the Bolognese physicians Matteo Bazzani and Gaetano Tacconi endorsed the presuppositions of maternal imagination in a dissertation on the fractures of a skull, in which they presented the case of a pregnant woman who craved a sausage and generated a malformed child with a protuberance in the head.42

In 1764, the surgeon Giovan Antonio Galli resumed the argument of maternal imagination in a speech on the origins of monsters that he delivered at the Institute of the Sciences.43 Galli had himself contributed to give expression to the visual world of maternity and generation by assembling for his midwifery school a collection of models realized by artificers including Giovanni Manzolini, Anna Morandi and Giovanni Battista Sandri.44 Having been appreciated from the outset for their utility and admired by foreign viewers, the models were purchased in 1757 by Pope Benedict XIV and were donated to the Institute of the Sciences.45 Galli was then nominated professor 39 Vallisneri, Istoria della generazione, 240–241. On resemblance and maternal imagination in early modern Italy, see De Renzi, ‘Resemblance, Paternity and Imagination’.

40 See Discorsi accademici di varj autori viventi intorno agli studj delle donne; la maggior parte recitati nell ‘Accademia de’ Ricovrati di Padova (Padua, 1729). See also R. Messbarger and P. Findlen (eds.), The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Women’s Learning in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago and London, 2005), 67–101.

41 A. Corradi, Dell’ostetricia in Italia dalla metà della scorso secolo fino al presente (Bologna, 1874), 354–355.

42 See Pancino, Voglie materne, 141.

43 See V. P. Babini, ‘Anatomica, Medica, Chirurgica’, in W. Tega (ed.), Anatomie Accademiche (Bologna, 1987), Vol. II, 71 and n. 20; and M. Bortolotti and V. Lanzarini (eds.), Ars Obstetricia Bononiensis. Catalogo ed inventario del Museo Ostetrico Giovan Antonio Galli (Bologna, 1988), 100.

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