Let's not talk about sex: Books and Babies exhibition – review

The Books and Babies exhibition at Cambridge University Library tells the story of how biology and medicine came to dominate the way we think about reproduction

Books and Babies exhibition - in pictures
William Hunter's 1774 Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus
William Hunter's 1774 Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Photograph: Syndics of Cambridge University Library

I'm in a dimly lit basement staring at a dismembered female torso. The legs, or what remains of them, are splayed to reveal the genitalia. Flaps of muscle and fibrous tissue are folded back over the abdomen and, underneath, I can see the curled-up form of an almost fully developed foetus.

William Hunter's 18th century Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus may only be an anatomical drawing, but it is a shocking introduction to Cambridge University Library's latest exhibition Books and Babies (part of the Wellcome Trust-supported Generation to Reproduction project).

One of the curators, Dr Francis Neary, asks me why I find the image so disturbing. I tell him that despite having worked in a hospital and dissected a human brain or two, there is still something unsettling about seeing the reproductive organs isolated from their personal and sexual setting. The morbid details, right down to the bone marrow inside the sliced femur, seem unnecessary.

Dr Neary interjects: "Yes, but what better way to separate sex from reproduction?"

This question seems to parallel the theme of Books and Babies. The exhibition charts the transition from a more general cultural view of sex and reproduction (once called "generation") to the current world of biomedical specificity.

Hunter's illustration is characteristic of this change: we know nothing of the woman, the sexual circumstances of conception or indeed how she felt about the prospect of being a mother. The biological function of the reproductive organs is the primary, if not the only, concern. Throughout the 18th century this approach was reinforced by the emergence of specialities such as embryology and obstetrics, each staking out a biological claim over the world of reproduction.

To give me a better sense of this transition, Dr Neary shows me the medieval manuscripts. I'm confronted first with a collection of grotesque characters, each depicting birth defects ("teratology" in modern medical parlance), then a 13th century work illustrating the reproductive world of animals. At first glance Bestiarium seems innocuous enough. But the text is striking: "Some say that weasels conceive through the ear and give birth through the mouth; others say, on the contrary, that they conceive through the mouth and give birth through the ear."

Given that 13th century men and women were presumably aware of how to reproduce themselves (here's hoping they didn't try the weasel technique), it seems surprising that such a wacky view of mammalian reproduction existed. But that's the point. Prior to the 18th century drive to bring reproduction under the all-encompassing roof of biomedical science, a range of views on conception, intercourse and babies existed.

Despite the neatness of modern biomedical science, however, reproductive issues retain their wider cultural connotations. Dr Neary points out a contemporary exhibit: a Daily Mail article on Nadya Suleman, or "Octomom" as the newspaper calls her.

In 2009 Suleman gave birth to only the second set of octuplets in American history. The Daily Mail's coverage had begun positively but soon turned sour when it was found that Suleman was already the mother of six children, unemployed, on benefits, and had conceived through in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Here, Suleman's reproductive abnormality is intertwined with a political agenda. Her desire for children despite being "unmarried" and "dysfunctional" is even compared to a mental illness.

IVF is an archetype of biomedical reproduction and the exhibition finishes with a display devoted to it. Beside hand-drawn notes and photos of lab benches sits the embryo chamber used by Robert Edwards leading up to the birth of the first "test-tube baby", Louise Brown, in 1978.

Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing the technique, but it is striking just how makeshift the chamber is. The device is a simple laboratory desiccator adapted to allow Edwards and his colleague Jean Purdy to perfuse the chamber with a gas mixture simulating the uterine environment.

In fact, the whole history of the development of IVF is somewhat haphazard. Edwards and his collaborator Patrick Steptoe were refused funding from the Medical Research Council and so set about conducting their own private research (including use of Edwards's own sperm). And rather than publishing their results in an academic journal, Steptoe and Edwards arranged an exclusive deal with the Daily Mail.

In the 2011 world of embargoed press releases, it gives pause for thought that the mainstream media should communicate scientific discoveries directly.

As I exit the exhibition, passing Hunter's gynaecological nightmare once more, I'm left with the feeling that the rise of biomedical science hasn't entirely changed the way we think about reproduction. We may no longer suspect the ear to be a suitable site for conception, but IVF and "Octomom" are indications that, no matter how medicalised our lives become, reproduction will always have a personal and political element that is hard to objectify.