The Mansion of Happiness (5 page)

“The journey of life is governed by a combination of chance and judgment,” Bradley had written, in his rules for the game, while still a young man. “In starting life, it is not necessarily a fact that poverty will be a disadvantage, so in the game it causes the player no loss.” But the older he grew, the better Bradley came to see that he had been wrong. Some people are given better chances than others. There are such things as lousy starts, rotten luck, and bad cards. Maybe he even regretted that he had placed Poverty so close to Infancy and made the chances of getting to School no better than one in three. The kindergarten movement was about beating those odds. Maybe, as he neared the mansion of happiness, Milton Bradley saw in making crayons for kindergartners not only their second chance but his, too: redemption, at last.

O
n April 30, 1965, seven years after
Sputnik
orbited the earth and four years before
Apollo
landed on the moon, a pink fetus appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine. Curled up inside a diaphanous white membrane set against a black background flecked with what looked to be clusters of stars, a tiny human being floated in space, as if traveling the Milky Way in a ship the shape of an egg.
“Living 18-week-old fetus shown inside its amniotic sac,” read the text. “Unprecedented photographic feat in color.” The magazine promised to reveal, for the first time, the “
DRAMA OF LIFE BEFORE BIRTH
.”

Inside, a seven-page spread, complete with centerfold, documented “the stages in the growth of the human embryo.” After photographs of
sperm swimming in a blue ocean and of a “ripe egg” lying in wait, there followed highly magnified color close-ups, taken by the Swedish photographer
Lennart Nilsson, of embryos at three and a half weeks, four, five, and more, all the way to a fetus of twenty-eight
weeks. Said one gynecologist, “This is like the first look at the back side of the moon.”
¹

Nilsson’s photographs, which also appeared in
Paris Match
and
London’s
Sunday Times
, were published just after Easter. Eight million copies of the magazine sold in just four days. In September, a New York publisher released a book version with the nativity-themed title
A Child Is Born.
(It has since sold more copies than any other illustrated book in the history of publishing.) The following May, the
American Society of Magazine Photographers named Nilsson Photographer of the Year. Before long, his photographs came to stand for humanity itself. In 1977,
NASA launched Nilsson’s portfolio into outer space, on board the
Voyager
probes, as evidence of life on earth.
²

There was, nevertheless, something altogether untethered about those haunting and beautiful
Life
photographs: page after page of embryos and fetuses, with not a pregnant woman in sight, which made it look as if those embryos and fetuses were living all on their own. But, of course, embryos and fetuses do not live on their own. Nilsson’s embryos and fetuses were dead: miscarriages,
abortions, hysterectomies. Only a single photograph
captured a living fetus: “the first portrait ever made of a living embryo inside its mother’s womb.” (The mother was not pictured.) The remaining photographs, including the eighteen-week-old fetus on the much-reproduced cover, had been—as the fine print explained—“surgically removed.”
³

The day
Life
published Nilsson’s photographs,
Time
reproduced its cover to illustrate a story in its own pages, called “The Unborn Plaintiff,” about the rights of
fetuses in criminal court cases. (“A pregnant woman is knocked down by a car and injured. Can she recover damages? Certainly—if the driver was at fault. But what about the unborn child? If he is born with a defect
caused by the accident, can he go to court and sue for an injury?”)
⁴
Nilsson’s photographs went on to galvanize opposition to abortion and to serve as the iconic symbol of what would come to be called the
pro-life movement.
⁵
But,
billed as portraits of life, Nilsson’s photographs were, in fact, portraits of death. Weirder still is that they were portraits of humans who looked as if they had been incubated in
eggshells, like
chickens, and launched into outer space, like so many baby-sized intergalactic rockets.

How life begins is a mystery. The facts of life used to be called the secrets of generation because how life began was not just any mystery but
the
mystery, the great mystery of life. Everyone could see that conception required
a man ejaculating into a woman’s body; past that, what else was needed, and what followed, was anyone’s guess. From antiquity to the Renaissance, most anatomists believed that people came not from eggs
but from seeds (
semen
is Latin for “seed”). Beginning in the fifth century b.c., a Hippocratic tradition maintained that conception required two seeds, male and female. A century later, in
On the Generation of Animals
,
Aristotle argued that only one seed was needed; human life began, he believed, when a man’s seed mixed with a woman’s menstrual blood, inside the uterus. In the second century a.d.,
Galen rejected Aristotle; he believed that the woman contributed a seed, too. This debate lasted for eighteen hundred years.

One-seeders and two-seeders agreed, more or less, on two points. First, conception happened when sex turned matter into life, by way of heat. The seed or seeds supplied the matter; orgasm supplied the heat. Because this happened inside a woman’s body, her orgasm, as much as the man’s, was often thought to be required for conception to occur (which is why, for a long time, in some places, a woman couldn’t charge a man with rape if he had gotten her
pregnant). Second, women and men had the same sexual organs, the only difference being that women’s are on the inside. This requires a certain exercise of the imagination. Galen offered this instruction: “Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s, and you will find the same in both and every respect.”
⁶

Aside from stretching your imagination to its limits, was there another way to get at this problem? Aristotle, for one, thought about how life begins by investigating it: dissecting the fetuses of animals, including an “aborted embryo,” probably human, and cracking open the eggs of
chickens. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is a question Aristotle actually asked. “A bird comes from an egg. There could not
have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds,” he insisted, “or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs.”
⁷

Setting aside the philosophical conundrum, the fact that eggs come from birds and birds from eggs has been clear enough, for quite a long time. The ancestor of the chicken was domesticated, probably in
India, five thousand years ago. Chickens were raised in
ancient China, and sometime after hens were introduced to Egypt from Mesopotamia, in about 1400 b.c., chicken eggs were artificially incubated, in brick ovens, by the
thousands.
⁸
Chicken eggs are big. Human eggs are teensy. Bird eggs vary in size, in proportion to the size of the bird—think of the difference between a sparrow
egg and an ostrich egg—but the egg of an elephant is about the same size as the egg of a mouse. If you pour out a handful of sand on a table, spread it out, and look for the
smallest grain—the speck just barely visible to the naked eye—that grain is about the size of the egg of a human, a horse, a whale, or a shrew.
⁹

Chickens are obvious. People are not. People come from people, not from eggs; people are born, not hatched. You can crack open an egg and look inside; you can’t crack open a person, although you can see a fetus by cutting open the uterus of a dead pregnant woman, which is what
Leonardo da Vinci did, in the fifteenth century, producing a drawing whose wondrous detail wouldn’t be matched for centuries but that calls to mind nothing so
much as an egg, cracked open.

The first person to imagine that people come from eggs, and not from seeds, was the Englishman
William Harvey, born in Kent in 1578. In 1600, when he was twenty-two, Harvey went to study at Padua with the Italian anatomist
Hieronymus Fabricius. Fabricius, an Aristotelian, had just finished a book called
The Formed Fetus.
He had also dissected hens’ eggs; his
Formation of the Egg and of the Chick
was
published posthumously.
¹⁰
Harvey earned his MD in 1602, returned to England, and, two years later, married Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of the king’s physician. That same year, the king, James, ordered a team of scholars to undertake an English translation of the Bible. In the
King James Bible, published in 1611, the word “seed”
appears more than two hundred times (“And I wil make thy seed to multiply as the starres of heaven,”
God tells Abraham); the word “egg” appears not once.

Harvey became a member of London’s
Royal College of Physicians and succeeded his father-in-law as James’s physician. According to a friend of his, the gossip-mongering
John Aubrey, Harvey was the first man in England “that was curious in anatomie.” While Harvey attended the king at court, a fleet of English ships, led by the
Discovery
, sailed across the ocean to establish what would become
England’s first permanent colony in the New World. The settlers named it Jamestown. They starved, not because the land was barren, but because they were unable to govern themselves. “Had we beene in Paradice it selfe,”
John Smith complained, “it would not have beene much better.” The colony’s lieutenant governor,
George Percy, described the settlers running around naked, “so Leane thatt they
Looked lyke anatomies.” Most of the colonists were men, which, as Smith saw it,
was part of the problem. One of the women, Percy reported, met a bad end: “one of our Colline murdered his wyfe Ripped the Childe outt of her woambe and threwe it into the River and after Chopped the Mother in pieces and sallted her for his foode.” (Added another settler: “Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d, I know not, but of
such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.”) Jamestown, Smith reported, was “a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell.” Nevertheless, in 1620, Pilgrims hoisted the sails of the
Mayflower
and headed to a land Smith had named “New England.”
¹¹

When James died, in 1625, his son Charles became king, and William Harvey became Charles’s physician. He continued his study of anatomy, making discoveries by way of vivisection. In 1628, two years before
John Winthrop and his band of
Puritans settled Massachusetts Bay, and seven years before
Milton Bradley’s ancestors washed up in Salem, Harvey announced the discovery for which he is now best
known: the circulation of the blood.
¹²
In this seafaring age, Harvey thought of himself as an explorer, inspired by “the Sedulity of Travellers” who had discovered lands unknown to the ancients, on the other side of the ocean. “To Us the whole Theatre of the World is now open,” Harvey wrote. He, too, had explored a whole new world: the inside of
the human body, which he navigated by way of the blood vessels. One poet compared Harvey to
Francis Drake, calling him the “Fam’d Circulator of the Lesser World.”
¹³
The body was his earth.

“In the beginning,” Locke wrote, “all the world was America.” In the age of discovery, theories about the origin of life were very often bound up with ideas about the New World. What William Harvey thought about men and beasts and kings and courts and worlds new and old, he put into his work. So, too, his thoughts about men and women.

Harvey, something of a misanthrope, kept a monkey. “He was wont to say that man was but a great mischievous baboon,” Aubrey wrote. Harvey also liked to say “that we Europaeans knew not how to order or governe our woemen, and that the Turkes were the only people used them wisely.” He thought a harem a good idea. He was not vaunted for his fidelity, Aubrey noted: “He kept a pretty young wench to wayte on him, which I guesse he made use
of warmeth-sake as king David did.” Married for over forty years,
he never had any children. His wife kept a parrot. More than that, about their marriage, is not known.
¹⁴

At the time, theories about what caused childlessness abounded.
The Birth of Mankind
, a midwifery manual first published in English in 1550, explained that the best way to discover the problem, in a barren couple, was to have husband and wife urinate onto seeds of wheat, barley, and beans, seven of each, and then plant the seeds in separate pots, filled with soil, and water them, every day, with urine. Whoever’s seeds failed to sprout was thought to be
the cause of the barrenness.
¹⁵
It’s for this kind of thing that doctors used to be called piss prophets.