Abstract
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, commercial exhibition halls across London, such as the Cosmorama Rooms, the Egyptian Hall and the Regent Gallery (to name three of the most popular), catered to an intense public interest in the display of human ‘curiosities’, including giants, dwarves, conjoined twins, representatives of exotic cultures, bearded ladies, professional fat men and human skeletons. During the spring of 1824, one of the most popular of these attractions was that of ‘the Sicilian Fairy’, Caroline Crachami, a nine-year-old girl of exceptionally small and delicate stature who, for the entrance fee of a shilling, could be viewed in the private Bond Street exhibition rooms of one ‘Dr’ Gillian.3 As the Morning Chronicle of 8 May 1824 reported, daily attendance rates at this exhibition often numbered in the hundreds, with medical specialists and members of the aristocracy to be found amongst the crowds: as the writer observed, ‘the morning calls of the Royal Family, the Nobility, the Foreign Ambassadors, and the highest members of the Faculty, and others of rank and fortune, have frequently exceeded two hundred’.4
Everything is given to us by means of touch, a mediation that is continually forgotten.1
How does one touch? An entire rhetoric resides in this question.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Luce Irigaray (1990) Sexes et genres a travers les langues: elements de communication sexuée (Paris: Grasset).
Jean-Luc Nancy (1992) Corpus (Paris: édition Métailée).
Crachami, whose condition was later diagnosed as ‘bird-headed dwarfism’, was the daughter of an Italian musician, Louis Emmanuel Crachami, who was employed at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. Crachami entrusted the nine- year-old girl to Gillian’s care after having received assurances that in London she would receive medical care for both her congenital condition and her consumption. For a detailed account of her medical treatment and diagnoses see Jan Bondeson (1997) A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Paul Youngquist (2003) Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. xi.
See, for instance, Robert Bogdan (1988) Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press);
Rachel Adams (2001) Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: Chicago University Press);
and Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press).
Barbara Stafford (1991) Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press);
Ludmilla Jordanova (1989) Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press);
Petra Kuppers (2004) ‘Visions of Anatomy: Exhibitions and Dense Bodies’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15:3, 123–56.
Jacques Derrida (1998) Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée), p. 155.
Elizabeth D. Harvey (ed.) (2002) Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), p. 2.
As Claudia Benthien argues, it is during the early modern period that skin takes on a new cultural importance, as an earlier, medieval ‘perception of the body as porous, open, and at the same time interwoven with the world’ came to be replaced ‘with one that viewed it as an individuated, monadic, and bourgeois vessel that the subject was considered to inhabit’. Claudia Benthien (2002) Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 37. The skin was the site and the sign of this newly individuated self, Benthien argues.
Jonathan Sawday (1996) The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York and London: Routledge).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1979) Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard), p. 115.
Luce Irigaray (1984) Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris: Editions de Minuit), pp. 162–4.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Elizabeth Stephens
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stephens, E. (2011). Touching Bodies: Tact/ility in Nineteenth-Century Medical Photographs and Models. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32900-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-35412-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)