Embryonic Individuals: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century Embryology and the Construction of Early-Modern Identity

Language, labour and ideology

“…While these developments in the history of midwifery are no secret, virtually no attention has been paid to the precise linguistic and textual practices that have accompanied the oftdiscussed historical and medical changes in the field; those that have devoted some attention to language usage (Keller 2000(Keller , 2003(Keller , 2007Green 2008a: 251ff. ) have done so without any systematic linguistic framework at hand, and the accompanying observations -while aptlack in precision and technical rigour.…”

Plant → animal → book: Magnifying a microhistory of media circuits

“…In fact, although its significance has been underemphasized in histories of the field, the bean was second only to the chicken egg in providing seventeenth-century researchersboth preformationists and epigeneticists -with a readily observable example of 'embryonic' growth. Marcello Malpighi and William Harvey, who worked alongside Highmore, both experiment with beans; Theodor Kerckring, turning an explicit analogy into a conceptual metaphor, calls a fetus he dissects a 'black cherry' (Kerckring, 1672, 4021; see also Keller, 2000).…”