Of human born : fetal lives, 1800-1950 / Caroline Arni ; translated by Kate Sturge.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Arni, Caroline, author.

Contributor:

Sturge, Kate, translator.

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Standardized Title:

Pränatale Zeiten. English

Language:

English

German

Subjects (All):

Prenatal diagnosis--History--19th century.

Prenatal diagnosis.

Prenatal diagnosis--History--20th century.

Heredity--History--19th century.

Heredity.

Heredity--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

363 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2024.

Summary:

"This book digs into the rich and mostly unexplored history of how the human sciences approached the unborn in terms of "fetal life" by extending their gaze and research to what they called "the period before birth.""-- Provided by publisher.

"A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciencesAt a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman's body has, once again, become a fraught issue-from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk-Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of "life before birth."Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of "fetal life" by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother's living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of "the human" in the age of scientific empiricism. Arni revises the narrative that the "modern embryo" is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman's body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Paris 1870/71 : trauma in the womb

Children, fetal life, and the prenatal

The unborn and the human sciences

The life of the fetus

Pregnancy as relation

Prenatal danger

How the pregnant woman feels

If the fetus senses

What the environment does

Thresholds in time

Of human born.

Notes:

Translated from the German.

Translation of Pränatale Zeiten. Das Ungeborene und die Humanwissenschaften, 1800-1950,

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Arni, Caroline. Pränatale Zeiten. English . Of human born

ISBN:

9781942130895

1942130899

OCLC:

1391095922