54 Bauhin defined an hermaphrodite as ‘a man [human] whose genitalia are malformed, and in whom, in addition to the proper pudenda, the pudenda of the opposite sex are present.’ Caspar Bauhin,
Herniaphroditomn rrmstrosaritmque partum i natura ex Theologynan, Jummsultomn, Mediconm, Philosophorum, & Rahbinonm (Frankfurt, Mathaeus Becker, 1600), p. 22.
55 See Chapter 5, pp. 97-9.
multiple levels of causation. Bauhin nowhere exphcit^ stated that a monster could have more than one level of causation: did the anger of God or the influence of the stars act directly on the developing infant, or might they bring about their effects by, for example, altering the quantity of semen, or stimulating the maternal imagination? Paré and Bauhin probably never considered this problem in detail, but it appears that the categories in their classifications do overlap. Bauhin did not give individual examples of each type of monster, but he included a few cases, one of which was said to resemble Christ. At Pilsen in 1542, he wrote, citing Fincelio: ‘A child was bom who was the image of Christ our Saviour crucified, as when the Blessed Virgin held him at the deposition from the Cross: the feet were bent inwards one over the other, and if moved they immediately sprang back to their place, and the neck was also bent, so that it was difficult to put food in the mouth. For a time it hved in Vienna, Austria.’ Fie attributed this case to maternal impressions (it may represent the consequences of ohgohydramnios).
De monstrorum
Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstromn was, I suggest, something of a new departure in the
description and classification of birth defects. Liceti (1577-1657) is noted for having survived from extreme prematurity. His mother was some seven months pregnant when she went into labour on a stormy sea voyage and her newborn son fitted into the palm of a hand (a small 28-week baby in a foetal position would just about fit onto a man’s hand). Flis father used a primitive incubator based on a modified oven to rear Fortunio (who earned his name). He was a brilhant student, receiving his doctorate in Medicine and philosophy at Bologna in 1600 before taking up the chair of logic at Pisa. Liceti was an
authority on Aristotle, and it may have been through The Generation o f Anhnds that he
acquired an interest in birth defects. He became Professor of philosophy at Padua in 1609, and his reputation for encyclopaedic knowledge brought him many students. He occupied a chair at Bologna until he returned to Padua as Professor of theoretical medicine, a post that he held until his death. During his academic career, Liceti wrote books at the rate of about one a year. The range of his learning was unusually wide even by the standards of
the time and his output included everything from historical works such as De Anmdis
Antiquis, an erudite treatise on the histoiy of finger-rings, to the astronomical text De Nazis A stris et Gamëds. Books with a medical theme included a work on the spontaneous
generation of animals and another on survival of long periods of fasting.^^
56 Sources on the life of Liceti are few. A bibliography of the French sources is to be found in the NotaeUe Bio^aphie Générale entry (Paris, Firmin Didot, 1860), vol. 31, pp. 131-5. A brief account in EngUsh is A.W. Bates’s ‘The D e M onstromn of Fortunio Liceti: a landmark of descriptive teratology’ Journal o f Medical Biography vol. 9 (2001), pp. 49-54.
After his death, his reputation was sustained for a time by reprints of his works but then
suffered a decline, perhaps because of an apparent credulousness. In De Lticemis
Antiquonm Reoondids^ for example, he advanced a theory that the ancients had placed perpetually burning lamps in their tombs, producing a peculiar glow that Ottavio Ferrari
explained away in his De Vetemm Luœmis Sepuhchralihus as nothing more than a momentary
phosphorescence on exposure to air. As one of the leading medical scholars of his day, it also fell to Liceti to reply to Harvey’s account of the circulation, putting forward an alternative account in accordance with his interpretation of Aristotelian phüosophy.^^ Seen by some as the last scholastic, Liceti was working outside his normal fields of study when
he wrote De M onstronm Caussis, NaturUy et DiffèrentüSy published in 1616. The structure of
this work owed much to its author’s experience of classical philosophy. Liceti began by setting out his motivation in dealing with the subject of monstrous births:
No matter how loosely related the things that I here classify, and notwithstanding the principle that a surfeit of material exceeds a man’s capacity for astonishment, those who, whether for good or ill, steadily persevere to the end may be said to be familiar with the sum of informed opinion concerning monsters: thus honourable and civilised men will become more excellent and almost like gods, whereas men who direct their attention to sin become gross and corrupt.^*
A scholar such as Liceti was well placed to raise the status of the study of monstrous births, long associated with ballads and popular entertainment, and his book, which went through several editions, was clearly intended as a reference for academics rather than a practical guide. He defined a monster as follows:
A monster is a being under heaven [ie., not supernatural] that provokes in the
observer horror and astonishment by the incorrect form of its members, and is produced rarely, begotten, by virtue of a secondary plan of nature, as a result of some hitch in the causes of its origin.^^
Liceti depicted the monster not in wonder book terms as an imusual occurrence but as something that was not as it ‘ought’ to be (an Aristotelian concept). The monster told the observer something about its own nature and origin:
57 Harvey saw his own account of the circulation of the blood as proof of Aristotle’s position - see Walter