From the exhibition Golden Boy by Suzanne Anker
Theme
Cambridge historians of medicine and biology are using a Wellcome strategic award to take a concerted approach to the history of reproduction. The cross-disciplinary group of researchers will offer fresh perspectives on issues ranging from ancient fertility rites to IVF. Building on a lively field of historical investigation, this will provide a fresh basis for policy and public debate.
'Generation' and 'reproduction' are at the heart of 'life-cycle' medicine. They involve
- theories of sex and gender;
- entities such as seeds, germs, embryos, monsters and clones;
- concerns about creation, evolution, degeneration and regeneration;
- investments in maternity, paternity and heredity;
- practices of fertility control, potency and childbirth; and
- health relations between citizen and state, individual and population.
'Generation to reproduction' thematizes gradual, long-term shifts and modern transformations. Within an all-encompassing process of 'generation', the human acquisition of a rational soul was the crucial event. In the era of revolutions around 1800 this gave way to the more narrowly framed 'reproduction'. Reproduction became an object of scientific knowledge, a target of medical and agricultural intervention, and a project for pressure-groups and states seeking to improve the quantity and quality of populations. Since World War II, scientific, social and ethical innovation has been particularly dramatic. But the term 'generation' has not disappeared; it has rather acquired new meanings, from 'F1' to 'generation X'.
Strands
Four complementary research strands will describe and explain continuity and change in practices and representations.
- 'Patients and practitioners' will study medical encounters with people seeking help with reproduction.
- 'Reproducing generations: conception and survival' will consider how maternal, fetal, infant and childhood health have affected adult health and fertility, and the reproductive impact of sexual behaviour and venereal disease.
- 'Representation and communication' will show how changing understandings of sex, development and evolution were produced, debated and used.
- 'Twentieth-century transformations: technologies, experiences and regulation' will explore the reproductive revolutions that made assisted conception routine.
