The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  The day Life published Nilsson’s photographs, Time reproduced its cover to illustrate a story in its own pages, called “The Unborn Plaintiff,” about the rights of fetuses in criminal court cases. (“A pregnant woman is knocked down by a car and injured. Can she recover damages? Certainly—if the driver was at fault. But what about the unborn child? If he is born with a defect caused by the accident, can he go to court and sue for an injury?”)4 Nilsson’s photographs went on to galvanize opposition to abortion and to serve as the iconic symbol of what would come to be called the pro-life movement.5 But, billed as portraits of life, Nilsson’s photographs were, in fact, portraits of death. Weirder still is that they were portraits of humans who looked as if they had been incubated in eggshells, like chickens, and launched into outer space, like so many baby-sized intergalactic rockets.

  How life begins is a mystery. The facts of life used to be called the secrets of generation because how life began was not just any mystery but the mystery, the great mystery of life. Everyone could see that conception required a man ejaculating into a woman’s body; past that, what else was needed, and what followed, was anyone’s guess. From antiquity to the Renaissance, most anatomists believed that people came not from eggs but from seeds (semen is Latin for “seed”). Beginning in the fifth century b.c., a Hippocratic tradition maintained that conception required two seeds, male and female. A century later, in On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle argued that only one seed was needed; human life began, he believed, when a man’s seed mixed with a woman’s menstrual blood, inside the uterus. In the second century a.d., Galen rejected Aristotle; he believed that the woman contributed a seed, too. This debate lasted for eighteen hundred years.

  One-seeders and two-seeders agreed, more or less, on two points. First, conception happened when sex turned matter into life, by way of heat. The seed or seeds supplied the matter; orgasm supplied the heat. Because this happened inside a woman’s body, her orgasm, as much as the man’s, was often thought to be required for conception to occur (which is why, for a long time, in some places, a woman couldn’t charge a man with rape if he had gotten her pregnant). Second, women and men had the same sexual organs, the only difference being that women’s are on the inside. This requires a certain exercise of the imagination. Galen offered this instruction: “Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s, and you will find the same in both and every respect.”6

  Aside from stretching your imagination to its limits, was there another way to get at this problem? Aristotle, for one, thought about how life begins by investigating it: dissecting the fetuses of animals, including an “aborted embryo,” probably human, and cracking open the eggs of chickens. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is a question Aristotle actually asked. “A bird comes from an egg. There could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds,” he insisted, “or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs.”7

  Setting aside the philosophical conundrum, the fact that eggs come from birds and birds from eggs has been clear enough, for quite a long time. The ancestor of the chicken was domesticated, probably in India, five thousand years ago. Chickens were raised in ancient China, and sometime after hens were introduced to Egypt from Mesopotamia, in about 1400 b.c., chicken eggs were artificially incubated, in brick ovens, by the thousands.8 Chicken eggs are big. Human eggs are teensy. Bird eggs vary in size, in proportion to the size of the bird—think of the difference between a sparrow egg and an ostrich egg—but the egg of an elephant is about the same size as the egg of a mouse. If you pour out a handful of sand on a table, spread it out, and look for the smallest grain—the speck just barely visible to the naked eye—that grain is about the size of the egg of a human, a horse, a whale, or a shrew.9

  Chickens are obvious. People are not. People come from people, not from eggs; people are born, not hatched. You can crack open an egg and look inside; you can’t crack open a person, although you can see a fetus by cutting open the uterus of a dead pregnant woman, which is what Leonardo da Vinci did, in the fifteenth century, producing a drawing whose wondrous detail wouldn’t be matched for centuries but that calls to mind nothing so much as an egg, cracked open.

  The first person to imagine that people come from eggs, and not from seeds, was the Englishman William Harvey, born in Kent in 1578. In 1600, when he was twenty-two, Harvey went to study at Padua with the Italian anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius. Fabricius, an Aristotelian, had just finished a book called The Formed Fetus. He had also dissected hens’ eggs; his Formation of the Egg and of the Chick was published posthumously.10 Harvey earned his MD in 1602, returned to England, and, two years later, married Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of the king’s physician. That same year, the king, James, ordered a team of scholars to undertake an English translation of the Bible. In the King James Bible, published in 1611, the word “seed” appears more than two hundred times (“And I wil make thy seed to multiply as the starres of heaven,” God tells Abraham); the word “egg” appears not once.

  Harvey became a member of London’s Royal College of Physicians and succeeded his father-in-law as James’s physician. According to a friend of his, the gossip-mongering John Aubrey, Harvey was the first man in England “that was curious in anatomie.” While Harvey attended the king at court, a fleet of English ships, led by the Discovery, sailed across the ocean to establish what would become England’s first permanent colony in the New World. The settlers named it Jamestown. They starved, not because the land was barren, but because they were unable to govern themselves. “Had we beene in Paradice it selfe,” John Smith complained, “it would not have beene much better.” The colony’s lieutenant governor, George Percy, described the settlers running around naked, “so Leane thatt they Looked lyke anatomies.” Most of the colonists were men, which, as Smith saw it, was part of the problem. One of the women, Percy reported, met a bad end: “one of our Colline murdered his wyfe Ripped the Childe outt of her woambe and threwe it into the River and after Chopped the Mother in pieces and sallted her for his foode.” (Added another settler: “Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.”) Jamestown, Smith reported, was “a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell.” Nevertheless, in 1620, Pilgrims hoisted the sails of the Mayflower and headed to a land Smith had named “New England.”11

  When James died, in 1625, his son Charles became king, and William Harvey became Charles’s physician. He continued his study of anatomy, making discoveries by way of vivisection. In 1628, two years before John Winthrop and his band of Puritans settled Massachusetts Bay, and seven years before Milton Bradley’s ancestors washed up in Salem, Harvey announced the discovery for which he is now best known: the circulation of the blood.12 In this seafaring age, Harvey thought of himself as an explorer, inspired by “the Sedulity of Travellers” who had discovered lands unknown to the ancients, on the other side of the ocean. “To Us the whole Theatre of the World is now open,” Harvey wrote. He, too, had explored a whole new world: the inside of the human body, which he navigated by way of the blood vessels. One poet compared Harvey to Francis Drake, calling him the “Fam’d Circulator of the Lesser World.”13 The body was his earth.

  “In the beginning,” Locke wrote, “all the world was America.” In the age of discovery, theories about the origin of life were very often bound up with ideas about the New World. What William Harvey thought about men and beasts and kings and courts and worlds new and old, he put into his work. So, too, his thoughts about men and women.

  Harvey, something of a misanthrope, kept a monkey. “He was wont to say that man was but a great mischievous baboon,” Aubrey wrote. Harvey also liked to say “that we Europaeans knew not how to order or governe our woemen, and that the Turkes were the only people used them wisely.” He thought a harem a good idea. He was not vaunted for his fidelity, Aubrey noted: “He kept a pretty young wench to wayte on him, which I guesse he m
ade use of warmeth-sake as king David did.” Married for over forty years, he never had any children. His wife kept a parrot. More than that, about their marriage, is not known.14

  At the time, theories about what caused childlessness abounded. The Birth of Mankind, a midwifery manual first published in English in 1550, explained that the best way to discover the problem, in a barren couple, was to have husband and wife urinate onto seeds of wheat, barley, and beans, seven of each, and then plant the seeds in separate pots, filled with soil, and water them, every day, with urine. Whoever’s seeds failed to sprout was thought to be the cause of the barrenness.15 It’s for this kind of thing that doctors used to be called piss prophets.

  William Harvey was keenly interested in discovering the secrets of generation, but not by way of piss prophecy. He wanted to bring to this question deduction, reason, and experiment. He started by speculating.

  “A Man, was first a Boy,” he began. “Before he was a Boy, he was an Infant; and before an Infant, an Embryo.” So far, so good. “Now we must search farther,” he urged, venturing into the unknown. “What hee was in his Mothers Womb, before he was this Embryo, or Foetus; whether three bubbles? or some rude and indigested lump? or a conception, or coagulation of mixed seed? or whether any thing else?”

  Following Aristotle and Fabricius, Harvey first sought the answer by cracking open hens’ eggs, which were “cheap merchandize,” and ready to hand.16 He may have begun this work on first returning to England from Padua, even before he took up his study of the circulation of the blood. He regretted that he was unable to gather evidence about his own species, “for we are almost quite debarred of dissecting the humane Uterus.” Even barnyard animals were hard to come by: “to make any inquiry concerning this matter, in Horses, Oxen, Goats, and other Cattel, cannot be without a great deal of paines and expense.” Fortunately, King Charles liked to hunt. “Our late Sovereign King Charls, so soon as he became a Man, was wont for Recreation, and Health sake, to hunt almost every week, especially the Buck and Doe.” From the king’s gamekeeper, Harvey claimed his catch: does, in the rutting season. “I had a daily oportunity of dissecting them, and of making inspection and observation of all their parts.” Evidence suggests that Harvey’s very good friend Thomas Hobbes attended at least one of these dissections.17 (In his will, Harvey left Hobbes ten pounds, “to buy something to keepe in remembrance of mee.”) The king, too, found Harvey’s work fascinating and “was himself much delighted in this kind of curiosity, being many times pleased to be an eye-witness, and to assert my new inventions.” Even the queen took an interest. “I saw long since a foetus of the magnitude of a Pease-cod, cut out of the uterus of a Doe,” Harvey wrote. “I shewed this pretty Spectacle and Rarity of Nature to our late King and Queen. It did swim, trim and perfect, in such a kinde of White most transparent, and crystaline moysture (as if it had been treasured up in some most clear glassie receptable) about the bigness of a Pigeons egge.” Harvey had seen human fetuses, too, including one “wherein the Embryo, who was as long as the naile of the little finger, did appear like a small frogge: having a broad body, a wide mouth, and his armes and leggs newly shot forth, like the young buds of flowers.” And there was more:

  Another humane Conception I saw (which was about fifty dayes standing) wherein was an egge, as large as an Hen-egg, or Turkey-egg. The foetus was of the longitude of a large Bean, with a very great head, which was over-looked by the Occiput, as by a crest; the Brain it self was in substance like Coagulated milk; and instead of a solid scull, there was a kind of Leather-membrane, which was in some parts like a gristle, distributed from the fore-head, to the Roots of the Nose. The Face appeared like a Dogs snout. Without both Ears, and Nose. Yet was the rough Artery, which descends into the Lungs, and the first rudiment of the Yard, visible. The two deaf-ears of the Heart, appeared like two black eyes.18

  Harvey’s descriptions are marvelous. A fetus was like a frog, a flower bud, a turkey egg, a large bean, something like milk, covered with leather, with a snout like a dog’s. Still, while the human fetuses, like the spectacle of deer embryos floating in egg-shaped sacs as clear as glass, were wonderful, what Harvey was really looking for was an egg.

  The famed circulator of the lesser world considered it a fallacy to believe, as most anatomists did, that different sorts of animals derived from different things: birds from eggs; vermin from worms; men from seeds. No, he insisted, they all came from eggs, even if, in some creatures, those eggs are incubated inside and, in others, out. He knew that this claim ran “counter to the common received tenets.” In fact, it bordered on anatomical heresy. “An egg,” he believed, turning prevailing wisdom on its head, “is the Common Original of All Animals.”19

  He didn’t expect everyone to agree with him. At the time, all sorts of people were challenging ancient knowledge of the natural world and challenging, too, the very nature of knowledge, and even its limits. What could be known was what could be investigated, demonstrated, and explained.20 Harvey’s theory of circulation (which, like his theory of generation, happens to have been right) did not gain easy or ready acceptance, partly because no one, not even Harvey, could explain what circulation was for. Harvey told Aubrey, “Twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained.”21

  Anticipating that his idea about eggs would be still more controversial, he was reluctant to publish his study of generation. And he never got around to publishing another book, which was to be called The Loves, Lusts, and Sexual Acts of Animals.22 Not until the end of 1648 was he persuaded to prepare his treatise for publication. He was, by then, an old man, in considerable pain, suffering from gout, and burdened with disappointment. His wife had died. England was at war with itself. In 1649, while Harvey worked on his manuscript, Charles was beheaded, leaving the future of the monarchy uncertain. For a time, Harvey was banished from London. In a portrait taken to serve as an illustration for his new book, Harvey, a dying royalist, looked so miserable that, in the end, the likeness was left out. Then Harvey, who “believed it lawful to put an end to his life when tired of it,” tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of laudanum. He failed.23

  Harvey’s De Generatione animalium was published, in Latin, in 1651. It was to be his lasting legacy, his own act of generation. A dedicatory poem noted at once Harvey’s intellectual fecundity, his childlessness—“Thy Brain hath Issue, though thy Loins have none”—and the parentless state of England: “Let fraile Succession be the Vulgar care; / Great Generation’s selfe is now thy Heire.”24

  This analogy—between a theory of generation and a hereditary monarchy—was not uncommon. The state has been thought of as a body for a long time; in English, the phrase “body politic” dates to the fifteenth century. Anatomy is a good place for the discussion—literally, the embodiment—of a political order.25 Harvey’s Generatione was published the same year as Hobbes’s Leviathan. In Leviathan, Hobbes postulated the existence of a primordial state of nature—a place, very much like Jamestown, where life is poor, nasty, brutish, and short—against which the leviathan, artificial man, civil society, is formed. “Life is but a motion of Limbs,” Hobbes wrote, “the beginning whereof is in some principal part within.” The leviathan, the state, is “but an artificial man,” healthy in times of peace, sickened by treason, and felled by civil war.26 In Generatione, Harvey attempted to deduce a state of nature, within the womb, out of which man was formed. In a state of nature, man is an egg.

  But Harvey had not found an egg. When he dissected does that had just mated, he never found anything in their uteruses. Not female seed, not male seed. Weeks later, he did find something; he found an embryo. But he thought he had found something else, and he called what he found, in Latin, an ovum, a word that, before then, had been used only to talk about birds’ eggs.27 (Aubrey: “He wrote very bad Latin.”)28 In 1653, Harvey’s Latin treatise was translated into English, and that ovum, the origins of life, an anatomical Eden, became an “egg.” But nothing inside the book made Harvey’s point so well as
its frontispiece, which pictured Zeus opening an egg, out of which hatched all manner of creatures: a grasshopper, a lizard, a bird, a snake, a deer, a butterfly, a spider, and a baby. “Ex ovus omnia,” read the motto: Everything from an egg.29

  “We shall call these vesicles ova, on account of the exact similitude which they exhibit to the eggs contained in the ovaries of birds,” the Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf wrote, in 1672, when he finally found the egg Harvey was looking for—or, at least, when he thought he had found it, although what he had actually found is what is now called the ovarian follicle.30 With de Graaf, what used to be called “female testicles” were renamed “ovaries.” Harvey appeared to be triumphing. But Harvey, who died of a stroke in 1657, was right to worry that people would think he was crack-brained.

  “Man comes not from an egg,” Antoni van Leeuwenhoek insisted in 1683, “but from an animalcule in the masculine seed.”31 He had seen it himself. The microscope was invented in Holland between 1591 and 1608, and the Dutch Leeuwenhoek was the finest microscope maker in the world. He was not trained as an anatomist, but what he saw with his lenses led him, in letters to London’s Royal Society, to challenge the authority of “your Harvey and our de Graaf.”32 He reported on the eye of a bee and the nose of a louse. He made a particular subject of himself. He looked at “a hair taken from my eyelid”; he looked at his spit. “I have often viewed the Sweat of my face,” he wrote.33 And then he looked at semen (the product, he took pains to point out, not of masturbation but of intercourse) and reported that he’d found in it “animalcules,” tiny animals.34 They could swim; they had heads and tails; they were microscopic men.

  After that, it took rather a long time for anatomists to work out what men and women contribute to generation. But from Harvey and Leeuwenhoek, for all their differences, emerged, eventually, a consensus: women aren’t men turned inside out, as Galen had thought. Women don’t have testicles, like men; they have ovaries, like hens. Women don’t make seeds; they make eggs.35 Hobbes had argued that in a state of nature, there are no natural rulers—not a king over his people, not man over woman. Men enter a political state when they consent to be governed. But women don’t consent to a government of men; they aren’t even part of it. Women, therefore, must be not lesser men, not lesser members of the body politic, but no members at all.36 “In everything not connected with sex, woman is man,” Rousseau wrote. “In everything connected with sex, woman and man are in every respect related but in every respect different.”37 But different, how? The poet who supplied the dedication to Harvey’s Generatione put it best: