Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T05:25:33.483Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Embryography of Alice B. Toklas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2008

Lynn M. Morgan
Affiliation:
Sociology and Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College

Extract

When Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a medical student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she spent the autumn of 1901 constructing an anatomical model of a young human brain. Most accounts call it an “embryo” brain, although as we shall see it likely belonged to a fetus or infant. The assignment was her final opportunity to obtain the medical degree after failing four classes in the spring of her senior year. Her anatomy professor, Franklin Paine Mall (1982–1917), offered her a second chance to graduate if she would finish her brain model and write an accompanying manuscript. Stein eventually produced sixty-three drawings and “roughly twenty-five pages of text,” in addition to the model itself (Meyer 2001: 89). She submitted the work in January 1902, but Mall judged it as inept and threw it away. Stein set off for Europe, leaving medicine behind forever. She settled in Paris where she became an avant-garde writer most notably known for her book supposedly chronicling the life of Alice Babette Toklas (1877–1967), who was Stein's longtime lover, secretary, editor, cook, and companion. The book, published in 1933, narrated the life of the inimitable Gertrude Stein, although it was playfully titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. 2002. Preembryo Research: History, Scientific Background, and Ethical Considerations. Ethics in Obstetrics and Gynecology. http://www.acog.org/from_home/publications/ethics/ethics69.cfm, accessed 19 Aug. 2003.Google Scholar
Anderson, Warwick. 2000. The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange. Comparative Studies in Society and History 42: 713–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Anderson, Warwick. 2006. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bardeen, Charles Russell. 1919. Letter to George Streeter, 8 Mar. Carnegie Institution of Washington Department of Embryology Collection, The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.Google Scholar
Barker, Lewellys F. 1899. The Nervous System and Its Constituent Neurones. New York: D. Appleton.Google Scholar
Barker, Lewellys F. 1901. Letter to F. R. Sabin, 27 July. F. R. Sabin Papers, American Philosophical Society.Google Scholar
Barker, Lewellys F. 1902. Letter to Henry McE. Knower, 9 Apr. Lewellys Franklin Barker Collection, The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.Google Scholar
Barker, Lewellys F. 1942. Time and the Physician. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.Google Scholar
Bensley, Edward H. 1984. Gertrude Stein as a Medical Student. The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha 47, 2: 3637.Google Scholar
Biggers, J. D. 1990. Arbitrary Partitions of Prenatal Life. Human Reproduction 5, 1: 16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bridgman, Richard. 1970. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chodat, Robert. 2005. Sense, Science, and the Interpretations of Gertrude Stein. Modernism/Modernity 12, 4: 581605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, Adele E. 1987. Research and Reproductive Science in the United States, 1910–1940. In, Geison, Gerald L, ed., Physiology in the American Context 1850–1940. Bethesda: American Physiological Society, 323–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, Adele E. 1998. Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and “The Problems of Sex.” Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleman, William R. 1971. Biology in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Conklin, Beth A. and Morgan, Lynn M.. 1996. Babies, Bodies, and the Production of Personhood in North America and a Native Amazonian Society. Ethos 24, 4: 657–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duden, Barbara. 1993. Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Duden, Barbara. 1999. The Fetus on the ‘Farther Shore’: Toward a History of the Unborn. In, Morgan, L. M. and Michaels, M. W, eds., Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1325.Google Scholar
Farland, Maria. 2004. Gertrude Stein's Brain Work. American Literature 76, 1: 117–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flint, Joseph Marshall. 1933a. Letter to Florence Sabin, 26 Sept. Florence Rena Sabin Papers, Joseph Marshall Flint folder, American Philosophical Society.Google Scholar
Flint, Joseph Marshall. 1933b. Letter to Florence Sabin, 25 Oct. Florence Rena Sabin Papers, Joseph Marshall Flint folder, American Philosophical Society.Google Scholar
Gallup, Donald, ed. 1953. The Flower of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Scott F. 2006. DevBio: A Companion to Developmental Biology. 8th ed.Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates. http://8e.devbio.com/article.php?ch=21&id=164; accessed 18 Feb. 2007.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Scott F. and Faber, Marion. 1996. Looking at Embryos: The Visual and Conceptual Aesthetics of Emerging Form. In, Tauber, Alfred I., ed., The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 125–51.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Scott F. and Howes-Mischel, R.. 2004. ‘Show Me Your Original Face Before You were Born’: The Convergence of Public Fetuses and Sacred DNA. History and Philosophy of Life Sciences 26, 3–4: 377–94.Google ScholarPubMed
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harrison, Ross G. 1934. Letter to the Yale secretary's office (Carl A. Lohmann), 10 Mar. Ross G. Harrison Papers, Yale University.Google Scholar
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, ed. 2004. Writing Modern Art and Science. Science in Context 17, 4: 423635.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopwood, Nick. 1999. “Giving Body” to Embryos: Modelling, Mechanism and the Microtome in Late Nineteenth-Century Anatomy. Isis 90: 462–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hopwood, Nick. 2000. Producing Development: The Anatomy of Human Embryos and the Norms of Wilhelm His. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74: 2979.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hopwood, Nick. 2002. Embryos in Wax: Models from the Ziegler Studio. London: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge; Institute of the History of Medicine; and the University of Bern.Google Scholar
Hopwood, Nick. 2004. Plastic Publishing in Embryology. In, Hopwood, Nick and de Chadarevian, Soraya, eds., Models. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 170206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopwood, Nick. 2005. Visual Standards and Disciplinary Change: Normal Plates, Tables and Stages in Embryology. History of Science 43: 239303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopwood, Nick. 2006. Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel's Embryological Illustrations. Isis 97: 260301.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hopwood, Nick and de Chadarevian, Soraya. 2004. Dimensions of Modeling. In, Hopwood, Nick and de Chadarevian, Soraya, eds., Models. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 115.Google Scholar
Khushf, George. 2006. Owning Up to Our Agendas: On the Role and Limits of Science in Debates about Embryos and Brain Death. Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 34, 1: 5876.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Knauft, Bruce M. 2006. Anthropology in the Middle. Anthropological Theory 6, 4: 407–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knower, Henry McElderry. 1902. Knower to Lewellys F. Barker, 7 Apr. Lewellys Franklin Barker Collection, The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.Google Scholar
Landecker, Hannah. 2004. The Lewis Films: Tissue Culture and “Living Anatomy,” 1919–1940. In, Maienschein, Jane, Glitz, Marie, and Allen, Garland E., eds., Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Volume V: The Department of Embryology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 117–44.Google Scholar
Mahowald, Mary B. 2003. Reflections on the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 46, 1: 131–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maienschein, Jane. 2002. What's in a Name: Embryos, Clones, and Stem Cells. American Journal of Bioethics 2, 1: 1219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maienschein, Jane. 2003. Whose View of Life? Embryos, Cloning, and Stem Cells. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malcolm, Janet. 2003. Gertrude Stein's War. The New Yorker, 2 June: 5981.Google Scholar
Mall, Franklin Paine. 1891. Methods of Preserving Human Embryos. American Naturalist 25: 1144–46.Google Scholar
Mall, Franklin Paine. 1910. A List of Normal Human Embryos which have been Cut into Serial Sections. Anatomical Record 4, 10: 355–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mall, Franklin Paine. 1911. Report upon the Collection of Human Embryos at the Johns Hopkins University. Anatomical Record 5, 7: 343–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendenhall, Dorothy Mabel Reed. 19391953. Autobiographical manuscript. Mendenhall Papers, box 3, folder 34. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.Google Scholar
Meyer, Steven. 1992. Gertrude Stein Shipwrecked in Bohemia—Making Ends Meet in the Autobiography and After. Southwest Review 77, 1: 1233.Google Scholar
Meyer, Steven. 2001. Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Michaels, Meredith W. 1999. Fetal Galaxies: Some Questions about what We See. In, Morgan, Lynn M and Michaels, Meredith W., eds., Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 113–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Lynn M. 2004. A Social Biography of Carnegie Embryo No. 836. Anatomical Record (Part B, New Anatomist) 276B, 1: 37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Lynn M. 2006. Strange Anatomy: Gertrude Stein and the Avant-Garde Embryo. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21, 1: 1534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulkay, Michael. 1997. The Embryo Research Debate: Science and the Politics of Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakajima, Gene. n.d. [ca. 1987]. Gertrude Stein's Medical Education and Her Evolving Feminism. Unpublished MS. Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.Google Scholar
Sabin, Florence Rena. 1901. An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain. Baltimore: Friedenwald Company.Google Scholar
Sabin, Florence Rena. 1933. Letter to Joseph Marshall Flint, 10 Oct. Sabin Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Sabin, Florence Rena. 1934a. Franklin Paine Mall: The Story of a Mind. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Sabin, Florence Rena. 1934b. Letter to Mary Sabin, 15 Nov. Florence Rena Sabin Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.Google Scholar
Sabin, Florence Rena. 1947. Letter to J.M.D. Olmsted, 13 Aug. Courtesy of University Archives, The Library and Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Sander, Kathleen Waters. 2002. The Unknown Gertrude. Hopkins Medical News (Spring/Summer). http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hmn/S02/annals.html (accessed 12 Oct. 2002).Google Scholar
Schoenberg, Bruce S. 1988. Gertrude Stein's Neuroanatomic Investigations: Roses or Thorns? Southern Medical Journal 81, 2: 250–58CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stein, Gertrude. 1933. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: The Literary Guild.Google Scholar
Stein, Leo. 1950. Journey into the Self: Being the Letters, Papers and Journals of Leo Stein. Fuller, Edmund, ed. New York: Crown Publishers.Google Scholar
Wilson, Edmund. 1971. Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Wineapple, Brenda. 1996. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.Google Scholar
Wineapple, Brenda. 2002. Unnatural Sentences. Boston Review Oct./Nov. http://bostonreview.net/BR27.5/wineapple.html; accessed 5 Jan. 2007.Google Scholar