Deviating from Monstrosity

Abstract

Between 1800 and 1807, Napoleonic reforms to obstetrics exposed more physicians to “monstrous births” (congenital anomalies). These reforms followed post-Revolutionary France’s need to re-define the “individual” and the Enlightenment’s attempts to naturalize the “monstrous.” Drawing on foundational eighteenth-century natural historical and medical texts, the article argues that the French Revolution was a major turning point in the conceptualization of dis/ability. To illustrate this, the illuminated volume Les Ecarts de la Nature (1775) by Nicolas-François and Geneviève Regnault and its 1808 edition revised by the physician Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe are analyzed through contemporary disability studies. The late eighteenth-century’s eventual eradication of monstrosities from the natural realm would lead to certain human bodies becoming normalized and others pathologized. This pathologization involved systematically categorizing human beings into forced binaries. Yet, by attempting to order that which does not fit into a binary, Les Ecarts attests that the dichotomy between “normal” and “abnormal” is a false narrative.