Conceiving Monsters: Women, Knowledge, and Anomalous Births in the Nineteenth-Century United States

summary: This essay examines historical case literature on "monstrous births," revealing how childbearing women both participated in and were excluded from processes of medical knowledge-making. In the nineteenth-century United States, physicians studied newborns with major anatomical differences as "medical specimens of monstrosity," asserting a singular authority over knowledge of bodies and reproduction. However, this essay shows that in practice medical knowledge-making entailed an interactive, socially embedded process that intimately engaged laywomen's perceptions, ideas, and understanding. By narrating and interpreting their lived experiences of pregnancy, women participated in determining the causes and meanings of anomalous births—even as hierarchies of gender, race, class, and citizenship conditioned and constrained this participation. Through an imaginative reading of case reports, this essay foregrounds the significance of diverse laywomen's social, affective, and embodied lives in historical practices of medical meaning-making. At the same time, it offers insight into how predominantly white male medical professionals increasingly sought to establish authority over women's reproduction.