A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites
London: Printed for J. Walthoe, 1741. First edition. 8-1/8 x 5-1/8 inches. [4],liv,[2, including one page of ads],156pp + 3 fold-out plates. Bound in later calf with red leather spine label stamped in gilt, blind rules and decorations to boards, new endpapers. Minor wear to boards; rear hinge cracked; slight crease to lower corner of beginning leaves; short tear to corner of one leaf; approx. 3" tear to one plate, affecting illustration. Possibly lacking a leaf containing one page of advertisements at the beginning, although it may simply have been inserted between p. liv and p. 1 here, instead. About Very Good.
A scarce copy of Parson's influential work on intersex individuals, called hermaphrodites at the time. Contrary to the position taken by many earlier physicians -- that intersex people, or people with male and female or at least ambiguous genitalia, exist and are not wildly uncommon -- Parsons applied Enlightenment ideas about Nature being fundamentally ordered and rational to proclaim that hermaphrodites were a mere superstition because "[a]n Hermaphrodite is an Animal, in which the two Sexes, Male and Female, ought to appear to be each distinct and perfect, as well with regard to the Structure proper to either, as to the Power of exercising the necessary Offices and Functions of those Parts" (pp.1-2). That is, a true hermaphrodite, in Parson's view, would need two fully functional sets of genitalia, one male and one female, and would need to be able to both cause pregnancy and be impregnated. Since no one had found a person in whom this was true, there was no such thing as a hermaphrodite. Instead, he argued, hermaphrodites were usually women with deformed genitals: what seemed like penises on women were in fact merely very enlarged clitorises, or "Macroclitorideae" or, alternatively, they were women with very small, hard breasts. This was supported by Parson's theological reasoning about the infallibility of God, as well as contemporary scientific ideas about reproduction, which generally assumed that animals were reproduced through preformation, meaning the organism was created in its entirety, in very tiny form, in either the sperm (animalculism) or ova (ovarianism). For Parsons, who subscribed to the theory of ovarianism, embryos were thus formed as tiny male humans or tiny female humans by God, and it was only during the act of conception that two embryos might get jammed together, thus forming such occurrences as conjoined twins or people that seemed to be hermaphrodites to the untrained eye.
Notably, Parsons was writing in response to the 1740 exhibition of the "African hermaphrodite," or "famous African," about whom Parsons reveals only that "she" was "carried from Angola in Africa, amongst other Slaves, to America, from whence she was brought to Bristol" (pp. 134) -- it is this intersex individual's genitalia illustrated in Figure 1. The press at the time touted this person in newspaper advertisements as "Mas, Mulier, Maurus, Mundi mirabile Monstrum!" ("Man, woman, Moor, marvelous monster of the world!" -- Geselowitz trans.). Although Parsons may have set back scientific study about human sexes by reinforcing the notion that there are only two, male and female, he was in fact arguing for the humanity of intersex individuals. Hermaphrodites weren't monsters, he insisted, but rather simply deformed humans, who could be baptised and even, importantly, choose whether they lived as men or women: in the Q&A section in the introduction, the answer to question No. 3, whether a hermaphrodite can marry, is, "It is granted according to the Predominancy of Sex, which ought to be regarded; but if the Sexes seem equal, the Choice is left to the Hermaphrodite."
An important work for the study of intersex history as well as transgender studies, uncommon in the marketplace.
See for reference: "Rationalizing Sex: the Hermaphrodite in Eighteenth Century Medical Writing," by Sara Welz Geselowitz.
