Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig

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Figure 3.3. A popular post-Descent caricature of Darwin as a “Venerable Orangoutang,” first published in the satirical magazine the Hornet (1871).

      AS EVOLUTIONARY IDEAS about hair seeped into everyday conversation, scientific and medical experts grew more concerned with what became known as “excessive” hair growth. Aesthetic concerns were transmuted into questions of evolutionary fitness. In 1878, seven years after the publication of Descent and one year after the first meeting of the newly formed American Dermatological Association, a Danish physician proposed a new disease category for the individual, “homo hirsutus,” said to suffer from excessive hair: hypertrichosis.⁴⁷ Subsequent practitioners began to diagnose disease when hair was found to be abnormal in location, quantity, or quality. As one physician working on the subject succinctly stated, “hypertrichosis is defined as an unnatural growth of hair.”⁴⁸

      But which hair, exactly, was to be considered unnatural? Predictably, the new diagnostic category produced a recurrent dilemma for clinical practice: distinguishing pathological levels of hairiness from ordinary hair growth. As with nymphomania (excessive sexual desire), alcoholism (excessive drunkenness), and other diseases first labeled in the nineteenth century, the criteria used to diagnose hypertrichosis were flexible and contested.⁴⁹ Experts disagreed, for instance, on how to demarcate the soft downy hairs known as lanugo (widely considered “normal”) from the “strong,” dark growths thought to be indicative of disease; in the words of one physician, “the one verges into the other almost imperceptibly.”⁵⁰ Making matters more difficult, experts trying to pin down a single definition of excessive hair identified racial variations in both hair growth and perceptions of that growth. Some reported a tendency for hypertrichosis in patients “of Jewish and Celtic extraction,” others in patients of Russian or Italian descent.⁵¹ Still others justified the exclusion of “negroes” from their studies of hair growth by insisting that a “deficiency of secondary hair is frequent in these people as compared to Caucasians.”⁵² Meanwhile, the fine amounts of facial hair on the “Mongolian, the American Indian and the Malay,” one specialist pointed out, might lead these peoples to find grotesque the prodigious quantity of hair “that is ordinarily found on the faces of Europeans.”⁵³

      Despite such diagnostic confusion, sorting normal from excessive hair became a pressing concern for late-nineteenth-century experts, who approached visible hair, particularly visible facial hair on women, as a crucial if often confusing marker of ill health. Post-Darwinian medical texts were rife with detailed classifying schema, designed to assist physicians in diagnosis. One dermatologist carefully delineated six types of hairy patients who might appear requesting treatment, from the woman with “a very fine white lanugo on the upper lip and sides of the cheeks” (which “is noticeable only to herself and should not be treated”), through the brunette with a short fine mustache (which “adds a certain artistic picture which is natural for that type of individual” and should also be left untreated), up to the patient who “shows coarse, stiff, long hairs” that “occupy the same regions as the male beard” (“This condition is a real indication for treatment”).⁵⁴ In especially complicated cases, the dermatologist explained, the presentation of the woman patient’s “male secondary sex characteristics” is “shown by her expression as well as the distribution and coarseness of the hair.”⁵⁵ When nature was functioning properly, experts after Descent presumed, men had body hair, and women did not.

      More precisely, young women did not have body hair. Consistent with evolutionary arguments concerning sexual selection, physicians typically proclaimed hairiness to be of medical significance only for premenopausal women. Reproductive pair bonding was the goal. As physician Adolph Brand explained, the practitioner’s primary encounter with hypertrichosis was among women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, “[t]his being the period of a woman’s life during which her physical charms receive her greatest attention.”⁵⁶ Another expert suggested that the “great majority” of cases of hypertrichosis affected women between the ages of twenty and thirty.⁵⁷ The age of the patient affected not only medical diagnosis but also medical treatment. One physician reported a colleague’s therapeutic principles: “While his indications are humane and even chivalrous to female sufferers under twenty-five years, his advice [is] not to yield to the entreaties of a married woman.” For patients over forty-five, the physician advised forgoing all treatment.⁵⁸

      Body hair’s role in sexual and reproductive fitness was further emphasized by medical reports of patients’ subjective experiences of hairiness. One of the few women physicians recorded in the related literature, Dr. Henrietta Johnson, described “one beautiful and attractive woman” who “would not marry, lest the hairy tendency which had made her own life a wretched one, and which she had tried by every known artifice to conceal, might be transmitted to her female offspring.”⁵⁹ (Johnson did not elaborate further on the “hairy tendency.”) Emphasizing young women’s deep, instinctual desire for hairlessness, dermatologist Ernest McEwen similarly insisted that women themselves yearned for effective treatment.

      The woman afflicted feels herself an object of repulsion to the opposite sex, and as a result, set apart from the normal members of her own sex. She realizes that she bears a stigma of the male and that she does not run true to the female type; therefore, every female instinct in her demands that the thing which marks her as different from other women be removed.⁶⁰

      Although they could not agree on clear standards of “normal” hairiness, physicians remained assured that for young women, abnormal hair growth ran counter to “female instinct.”

      ONGOING ATTEMPTS TO quantify and classify hair growth reflected broader efforts to discern exactly what “excessive” hair might signal about its possessor. Born of the same anthropometric traditions of comparative measurement and observation that gave rise to Darwin’s theories of variation, diverse groups of investigators began counting hairs as a way to engage wider social and political concerns. Their analyses were part of a significant cultural shift ongoing in the late nineteenth СКАЧАТЬ