Nick Hopwood: '“Your Baby Is the Size of a Kumquat”: Verbal and Visual Similes for the Scales of Human Eggs, Embryos, and Fetuses’

Nick Hopwood, Cambridge University, UK

Abstract:

Historians know much about cultures of measurement. Practices of comparing are attracting attention. Yet there remains much to discover about the uses of similes to anchor the sizes of unfamiliar things. Take a 2021 email from BabyCenter.com, the pregnancy and parenting website, which stated “You’re 10 weeks pregnant! … Your baby is barely the size of a kumquat” above a drawing of an embryo and a photo of an orange fruit. The talk will show how, from 1997, investment in fetal patients and commercial pressures on digitally mediated pregnancies made consuming weekly fruit-and-vegetable sizes from poppyseed to pumpkin a standard part of the experience. It will place this recent change in a history of how, in training midwives and advising pregnant people in English and German since early modernity, words and pictures have conveyed the scales of human eggs, embryos, and fetuses. Representations of their growth have become central to the dominant account of human origins, alongside (another story) their development. Politics of food and of reproduction—including battles over abortion and the promotion of embryo research—explain the diversification of verbal comparators from ants and bees, barleycorns and pins. The introduction of visual similes (“objects for scale”) participates in a general shift, but this is only in part a tale of increasing visualization. Similes still rely on words, typographical ones (“no bigger than the full stop at the end of this sentence”) save on illustrations, and pictures may merely call an object to mind or invite the viewer to play.