Monstrosity in Medical Science: Race-Making and Teratology in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

This essay analyzes the medical study of “monstrous birth” as a site of race-making in the nineteenth-century United States. It argues that the medical theorization of monstrosity was structured by multiple logics of race, which both shaped and emerged from medical authorities’ efforts to classify and interpret anomalous newborn bodies. Materialized at the intersection of these logics, the biological monster theorized a racial order that was hierarchical, temporalized, and vulnerable to the dangers of women’s reproduction. In this context, monstrosity became a way to advance claims about the nature of racial hierarchy, articulate the threat and mechanism of racial degeneration, and negotiate the contradictions of shifting racial imaginaries across the nineteenth century. Exploring the medical engagement with monstrosity thus sheds light on entanglements of medical science and race-making in U.S. history, showing how practitioners produced and elaborated unstable concepts of scientific race, and revealing how race was linked to reproduction in the emergence of modern biomedical discourse.