Portraying The Embryo

摘要

"Do we not find a rosebud as beautiful in its own way as a rose?", mused the great German anatomist Samuel Thomas Sommerring. He was defending his revolutionary work, published as a series of large-format plates in 1799, showing that embryos took different forms at different stages. The story of how embryos have been depicted is the subject of the online exhibition Making Visible Embryos, by historians of science Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood. Before Sommerring, anatomists adhered to the Aristotelian theory that the individual adult was present in the germ cell, and simply grew in size - no rosebuds, just small, perfect roses. The debate was only whether the homunculus was encapsulated in the egg or the sperm. The concept of the embryo as an unformed blob did not fit with theories of the Creator's perfection. Then experimentation took over. Human embryos were in short supply, but Sommerring systematically acquired them from abortions, picked out the best examples, which he assumed to be less malformed, and drew his own conclusions.