[The individualisation of hermaphrodites in seventeenth century medicine and natural history].

Certain significant changes in the way in which human hermaphrodites were depicted and described in scientific texts occurred over the course of the seventeenth century: Around 1600, short notes about hermaphroditic individuals, and pictures thereof, circulated widely, between both erudite texts and more popular text genres such as the broadside or the Prodigy book, amongst others. They were usually rather short and, due to conventions that reached back over centuries, very similar in style. In contrast, articles published mostly by medical men in the new learned journals, between 1670 and 1710, typically provided the reader with a very precise description of an hermaphrodite who had been examined by the respective author. Both verbal descriptions and pictures now seem to be less constricted by convention and are more specific. Above all, they individualise the examined hermaphrodite: much biographical and anatomical detail renders the person in question as more than another example of a type shaped by learned tradition. The article shows how more general developments of the sciences led to this remarkable change.