A ‘Monstrous Girl’ Described and Depicted
CAMPEN, Michael Johan van. Puellae monstrosae delineatio, quam annuente summo numine … Leiden: Jacob Douzy. 1793.
4to. Contemporary full red morocco, tooled in gilt to a panel design, large floral cornerpieces, centrepieces composed of smaller floral tools, borders roll-tooled in gilt, spine ruled and gilt and decorated with floral tools, patterned endpapers of pink and green flowers; pp. v, [1 (blank)], 13, 8, [1 (blank)], with half-title, 2 folding copper-engraved plates by P[ieter] de Mare after A[braham] Delfos; typographic ornaments to title, typographic headpieces, woodcut tailpiece; nineteenth-century oval blind-embossed stamp ‘Du Cordes, Genève’ to title.
First and only edition of this handsomely bound and printed thesis on teratology submitted by Michael Johan van Campen for examination as doctor of medicine at the University of Leiden, focusing in particular on the effigy of a young girl preserved at the university’s anatomical museum, with intersex characteristics and missing both of her legs and her right arm.
Van Campen writes that those who lack legs as well as arms are ‘to be considered much more unfortunate [than those only lacking arms or hands], who use their feet in such a way that they hardly seem to lack the use of their hands’ (p. 2, trans.), citing the work of Italian physician Matteo Bazzani (1674–1749) on teratology and its incorporation into Gaetano Tacconi’s 1751 dissertation De nonnullis cranii ossiumque fracturis and describing at length Tacconi’s observation on patients who learned to write by holding quills in their mouths, pick up cutlery and slices of bread with their toes, and sew and weave using their feet.
Van Campen’s first-hand experience with congenital abnormalities comes from the ‘effigy’ of a ‘young girl, whom [Sandifort] had seen in [Leiden] some years ago, and met with on some occasions’, from the ‘remarkable collection of monsters which were exhibited at the Anatomical Theatre, or whose figures [Sandifort] had at hand’ (p. 9, trans.). She was able to move by lifting herself on one hand, and her torso ‘rested on what looked like two cushions’ (p. 10, trans.), or soft appendages, one of which was mobile, and she displayed numerous intersex characteristics. ‘The genitals could hardly be seen unless the girl leaned on her back and the two tubercles moved by hand. There were no labia of the vulva, but the folds of the skin merged into these protrusions, and the clitoris was prominent’ (p. 11, trans.), the plates by Pieter de Mare after Abraham Delfos respectively illustrating the girl’s entire body and the form of her genitalia.
The engraver and draughtsman Abraham Delfos (1731–1820) trained under Jan Wandelaar (engraver of the frontispiece and illustrations to Linnaeus’ 1737 Hortus Cliffortianus) and was responsible for numerous medical illustrations and anatomical drawings, including a depiction of a charlatan doctor now held by the Rijksmuseum and some three hundred drawings of specimens for the use of the Anatomical Museum of Leiden, notable for its teratological collections and including drawings of hydrocephalus and conjoined twins, inter alia. The museum’s collections were later described in full by Eduard Sandifort, professor of anatomy at Leiden and prefect of the university (mentioned in the present work on p. 8) who had commissioned illustrations of dissection by Delfos, and by Sandifort’s son Gerard (1779–1848).
There follows a laudatory poem in Dutch, written in Van Campen’s honour by his friend Johannes Elias Goetzee (JUD).
OCLC finds four copies outside continental Europe, two in the US (Harvard, NLM) and two in the UK (Edinburgh, Wellcome), to which Library Hub adds another at Glasgow.
STCN 298294575; Index-catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office III, p. 104; Sandifort, Catalogus librorum: cum medicorum, anatom., chirurg … (1849) 564; seemingly not in Wellcome.
SKU: 2123849