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Annie Bitbol-Hespériès (Paris)
Abstract
In the texts dealing with monsters, the sets of human double monsters, in particular conjoined twins, have been, without any doubt, the ones who provoked the most surprise, the most curiosity and the most amazement.
With their physical peculiarities and their varied appearances, conjoined twins have fired our imagination and triggered many debates in which philosophical issues have been important. Double monsters have crystallized in an exemplary way the problems we must face with monsters: (i) as regards the reactions towards their extraordinary physical appearance and their place in society, (ii) as regards their ontological status and their place in Nature – which had been for a very long time tightly associated with God, (iii) as regards the issue of their causes, which for a long time were not treated independently from theological concerns. Double monsters have raised some important additional questions: their individuality, i.e. do conjoined twins have one soul or two?, an important question linked with the discussions about the ‘life principle’ and the seat of the soul, and not only with the decision to baptize either one person or two. Another important question concerning human double monsters when they had lived long, related to their psychology and whether they have different personalities, not to mention the possibility of their being separated by surgery and the details of their autopsy reports showing the importance of the fusion of their organs and of the interest in the mechanics of matter.
These issues were not raised independently from the accounts of monstrous births and, from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, from the publication of ‘canards’, pamphlets and broadsides showing illustrations of conjoined twins, or from the encounter with
traveling conjoined twins.
Part one of my paper deals with the conception of conjoined twins in relation to the notions of ‘spectacle’ (or ‘show’) and of Nature. The importance of theology and philosophy in the first medical treatises about monsters is studied. Part two examines the changes initiated in such a context by some physicians from the beginning of the seventeenth century and by René Descartes. The split between the investigation about monsters and theology is shown, as well as the importance of the new conception of nature in the works of René Descartes, especially in relation to matter and to the laws of nature. Part three shows the limitations in the influence of these fundamental changes in the eighteenth century. I study in particular the influence of theological and teleological arguments in the debates concerning detailed dissections of conjoined twins at the Académie des Sciences.
Bio
Annie Bitbol-Hespériès is the author of Le principe de vie chez Descartes
(Paris: Vrin, 1990) and produced the critical edition of Descartes’
Le Monde including the treatise on man (L’Homme) (Paris: Seuil, 1996).
She recently prepared a large multimedia exhibition,
“Les Monstres à la Renaissance et à l’âge classique”, for the
Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine in Paris.
<personal webpage>
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