Article ID: CBB001510245

Traversing Birth: Continuity and Contingency in Research on Development in Nineteenth-Century Life and Human Sciences (2015)

unapi

Arni, Caroline (Author)


History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Volume: 37, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 50-67


Publication Date: 2015
Edition Details: Part of a Series: Temporalities of Reproduction
Language: English

In the history of life sciences, it has often been argued that the individual organism emerged, around 1800, as a four-dimensional entity---a temporalized entity. Against this backdrop, the article asks how research on development contributed to structuring the time of the organism in terms of a historical process, that is, by understanding a given phenomenon as brought forth by what preceded it and as establishing conditions for what will follow, thus relating the past, the present and the future in a specific way. To shed light on this conceptualization, we must take into account not only embryological research on morphogenesis but also physiological research on the genesis of vital functions and the causation of congenital anomalies. Three layers of structuring time in such research may be discerned: the making of a trans-natal continuity of the developing organism; a conceptualization of birth as a threshold of past and future that paradigmatically reveals the historical understanding of such developmental continuity; and an approach to intergenerational transmission that confronts developmental continuity with historical contingency. My contribution focuses on the work of William T. Preyer and Charles Féré but, in a genealogical vein, situates their work in the larger context of nineteenth-century research on development.

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Article Bock von Wülfingen, Bettina; Brandt, Christina; Lettow, Susanne; Vienne, Florence (2015) Temporalities of Reproduction: Practices and Concepts from the Eighteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (pp. 1-16). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001510245/

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Authors & Contributors
Schmitt, Stéphane
Dupont, Jean-Claude
Brauckmann, Sabine
Simone Aurora
Murray, Isabel
Lowe, James W. E.
Concepts
Embryology
Biology
Physiology
Anatomy
Medicine
Cytology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
18th century
21st century
Early modern
Places
Germany
London (England)
United States
Italy
Europe
Great Britain
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