PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

1475, and two girls joined together in one body (see figure 19). 951 Related to this
category of monsters was also a chapter on women who had given birth to more than
one offspring in the same pregnancy, and also a story about a woman in Vienna
‘qu’elle ayt porté cinq ans son fruict mort en son corps’. 952
Monstrous births, and in particular conjoined twins, were a topic closely associated to
medicine and in particular to the development of anatomy and surgery as a science. 953
For instance, Vesalius had written an unpublished second volume of his De humani
corporis fabrica focusing on illness and monstrosity. 954 Before the sixteenth century,
the theory of surgical study was studied as a unit separate from practical training.
These two came to be intertwined gradually, through the revival of works from
classical authorities such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, and the multiplication
of anatomy theatres (although in France this was slower to develop than in the rest of
Europe). The latter’s role was very important, since it allowed students to observe
directly the inside of the human body (often those of executed criminals) by means of
dissection. As mentioned in Chapter One, Boaistuau was present at dissections in
Rome and later Paris, and described human organs in Le Théâtre du monde. 955
However, it seems safe to assume that the writer did not attend a medical autopsy
951 Such depictions were usually borrowed from broadsheets and pamphlets on the subject of monstrous
births, conjoined twins and human-animal monsters, which were circulated widely not only in France
but across Europe. See Céard, J., La nature et les prodiges, pp. 468-483; Niccoli, O., Prophecy and
People in Renaissance Italy, esp. Chapter Two; Cressy, D., Agnes Bowker’s cat: Travesties and
Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), Chapter Two.
952 Boaistuau, P., Histoires prodigieuses, pp. 137r-138r. According to Boaistuau, the woman carried the
dead child from 1545 until 1550, when she was subjected to a Caesarean section – the first of its kind
to be performed on a living woman. The source of this story was the Viennese physician Mathias
Cornax (c. 1510-1564), who operated the woman.
953 For an introduction see Brockliss, L., Jones, C., The Medical World of Early Modern France
(Oxford, 1997); Broomhall, S., Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (Manchester, 2004).
On conjoined twins see for instance Thijssen, J. M., ‘Twins as monsters: Albertus Magnus’s theory of
the generation of twins and its philosophical context’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 61
(1987), pp. 237-246.
954 Siraisi, N., ‘Establishing the Subject: Vesalius and Human Diversity in De humani corporis fabrica,
Books 1 and 2’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 57 (1994), pp. 60-88.
955 See Chapter One, p. 50.
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