Monster Collectors from Peter to Willem: Abnormal Bodies and Embryology, 1697-1849

The Dutch anatomist Willem Vrolik collected several hundred abnormal human fetuses over the first half of the nineteenth century. Vrolik was one of the early teratologists, scientific men who sought to classify types of bodily abnormality and, through classification, discern what caused them. Vrolik created a museum showing that “monstrous bodies” appeared throughout the animal kingdom in regular morphological types that, he claimed, were produced when the normative workings of an immaterial force called vormkracht were disrupted. Vrolik’s collection and classification of abnormal fetuses followed a century of scientific dispute about the processes of generation. The belief that collecting, anatomizing, and comparing “monstrous bodies” might reveal their natural causes was first put forth by the Russiam Tsar Peter the Great after he learned new techniques of anatomical preservation during his 1697 visit to Amsterdam. Upon returning to Russia, Peter issued a royal order that all monstrous births-- human and animal, alive and dead-- should be sent to him for preservation. It was Peter’s “storehouse of monsters” that Caspar Wolff used later in the century to bolster his theory of epigenetic embryological development. Beginning with Peter’s monster collecting and ending with Vrolik’s teratological museum, this paper examines how preservations of “monstrous births” offered materialized epistemological tools for naturalists attempting to unravel the mysteries of embryological development. While "wet" preservations were new in Peter’s time, they had become a central part of anatomy collections by Vrolik’s. I argue that this shift in material evidence was crucial to the epigenetic turn in embryology.