People of short stature as representatives of the gods?

By Bert Gevaert, PhD

Seneb and his wife Senetites (ca. 2520 BC)
(Egyptian Museum, Cairo)

People of (unusually) short stature¹ are extremely popular in art: portrayal of people with so called ‘proportionate’ or ‘disproportionate’ short stature (usually achondroplasia) can be found all over the world and through the entire history of mankind. People of short stature were popular in ancient Roman and Greek art, but also in Asian, African and Latin American cultures. Fascinated by the tiny appearance of their fellow human beings, artists from Classical Antiquity till today liked to sculpt, cast, draw, paint, photograph or film people of short stature. Do these persons remind them (and us!) of ancient mythology about people of short stature living in faraway places? Do they attract us by their doll-like features? Are they funny, simply because they are smaller than ‘normal’ people? Some people consider them as more than funny, in their opinion they are ridiculous and for them they are a popular target to laugh with.

Without any doubt the Italian painter Faustino Bocchi (1652-1752) was one of history’s artists who was obsessed by people of short stature. Nevertheless, he is less famous than Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) who also made several beautiful paintings of the same subject (e.g. Las Meninas, 1653). Faustino Bocchi, who lived in Brescia, was specialized in painting people of short stature in ridiculous poses and situations. These paintings caused great amusement amongst his clients and made Bocchi a wealthy person. His tour de force, which was actually a shameless imitation of the works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526/7-1593), is without any doubt the portrait of a human face, consisting of grotesque ‘pygmies’.

Faustino Bocchi, A Head formed out of Pygmies (1729)
(Christie’s Images/Corbis)

Today, looking at this painting, we can nod our head and condemn this painting of Bocchi, naming it ‘disrespectful’ towards a minority group, which is certainly a right attitude. On the other hand, Bocchi’s depiction of little people is only an exaggerated version of all other depictions of people with short stature in art around the world and throughout history. Almost always these people are portrayed with an emphasis on their tiny stature: they are shown with furniture, their protectors or benefactors (adult men and women or even children), various kinds of animals (parrots, dogs, monkeys,…) which make the contrast between big (normal?) and small even bigger. The animals on paintings with people of short stature seem to suggest that they were seen as nothing else than another kind of pet, meant to amuse their masters. 

To my knowledge, there are almost no paintings or sculptures of people of short stature in a normal environment, where their size doesn’t matter. Almost always they are represented in art as utterly little, incredibly cute, unbelievably ugly, mysteriously strange or hilariously ridiculous. It seems like they don’t have no other function than to please and divert other people. Do they have a life outside of the painting? Do they have a wife? Do they have kids? Are they more than just people who are smaller than ‘normal’ people? 

In that respect, the sculpture of Seneb and his wife Senetites, made by an unknown Egyptian artist around 2520 BC, is a unique depiction of a person of short stature. Seneb is portrayed in a very respectful manner, with his wife and children. Seneb is seated on the same height as his wife and because he crosses his legs while sitting, it can’t be seen, at first sight, that he is smaller than his wife. In this way, both are on ‘the same level’: they are equal in height and this might suggest a harmonious marriage as well. She is a beautiful woman and puts her arm around her husband in a  very tender and loving way. The danger that the harmony – on the level of art and life -  between this Egyptian man and his wife could be disturbed by the little legs of the husband, is avoided in a very intelligent way. The artist has replaced Seneb’s legs by two of the children of the couple, a boy and a girl. Seneb’s children serve as the legs of their father, but they are also the symbol of a successful marriage.

Seneb was a proud man, enjoying a happy life as a father, but also as a personal friend of the pharaoh. In the tomb of Seneb (near Cairo) about twenty of his royal titles can be found: friend of the Pharaoh, overseer of the dwarfs, overseer of the royal ships, overseer of the animal tenders, keeper of the seal of the gods,… Besides that Seneb and his wife were both important priests.

Why did Seneb obtain this prestigious position and why – as a consequence – was he depicted in the most respectful matter a person of short stature has ever been in history? Ancient Egyptians were very kind towards mentally and physically challenged people, but amongst them, people of short stature were the most respected. In ancient Egypt, at least two gods were venerated who had small stature: Bes and Ptah Pataikos. Bes was the god who protected women against evil, especially when they delivered babies. Ptah Pataikos, on the other side, was connected to Ptah, who was god of craftsmen and architects. Thus, both were very important gods.

Bes (3th-1st century BC)
(Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)

Ptah-Pataikos (Late Period, 712-332 BC)
(Carslberg Glytotek, Copenhagen)

In their appearance, Bes and Ptah-Pataikos show typical characteristics of what is medically phrased as ‘achondroplasia’, the most common form of short stature. People of short stature, who are said to have achondroplasia, usually have a torso with ‘normal’ size, disproportionate small limbs with slightly curved legs and a large (fore)head. All these characteristics are prominently depicted in Ptah-Pataikos and Bes.

People of short stature reminded the ancient Egyptians about the scarab or Sacred scarab (scarabaeus sacer), a species of dung beetle which has a normal sized torso and tiny, disproportionate and curved limbs. This insect makes small balls of dung which he rolls out or towards his hiding place. This movement of rolling a ball out of a hiding place, reminded the ancient Egyptians about the movement of the rolling ball of the sun. In the eyes of the ancient Egyptians, people of short stature were not suffering from a physical challenge, but they were representatives of the gods here on earth. In this way, they deserved the highest respect!

Bert Gevaert obtained a PhD on the representations of disabilities in the epigrams of the Roman author Marcus Valerius Martialis (40-104 AD) (Free University of Brussels, 2013).

^[1] For this text I preferred to use the term ‘people of short stature’ instead of other (combinations of) words, e.g. ‘little people’, ‘short people’, ‘small people’ or worse… ‘dwarf’. Though dwarfism refers to the medical condition of being unusually smaller than average (https://www.lpaonline.org/faq-) and some people of short stature have no problems with the word ‘dwarf’, the term ‘people (or person) of short stature’ is less biased and less insulting.^↩

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Recommended Citation:
Bert Gevaert (2018): People of short stature as representatives of the gods?. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 12.

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“Just like everyone else”: Studying constructions of ‘normality’ through attitudes towards conjoined twins

By Helena Franzén, Uppsala University

In 1996, the American conjoined twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel went on the Oprah Show and spoke about their daily lives and their wish to impress upon the viewers how they both were quite ordinary people. Documentaries followed and they got their own reality show at TLC. In the show, the audience could follow their everyday life; at home, in school, and when doing extracurricular activities such as taking their respective driver’s licences. The viewers were also allowed to access the twins’ hopes, dreams, and plans for the future. Abigail and Brittany portrayed themselves as having two quite different personalities and expectations on life, and went on air to counter preconceptions about conjoined twins. By showing the public how normal they actually were, they wanted to demystify the condition. They were two young girls who wanted to raise awareness and be treated as the regular persons they were. The Youtube clip below shows one of the first documentaries about the twins. The strongest message is that Abigail and Brittany indeed are just the same ‘as everyone else’, a few physicians flash by. Even though they themselves stress that they respect the wishes of the twins and their family to not conduct more advanced medical investigations than regular check-ups, the strong curiosity still shines through.

YouTube video titled "Abigail & Brittany Hensel - The Twins Who Share a Body"

Conjoined twins have been a topic of interest in medicine for many centuries. Physicians have for example debated whether these bodies were the vessels of one or two souls, as well as pondered why and when this condition happens during pregnancy. In my research, I examine the social processes of collecting bodies for medical science in nineteenth-century Sweden. More specifically, I am interested in why and how the bodies of embryos and fetuses, of which many were conjoined twins, were obtained, transformed into scientific objects, and put on a shelf in a medical collection. An aspect of this is the social construction of ‘normality’ and ‘pathology’, as well as who set the boundaries. How were conjoined twins understood in the Swedish society at the time? To contrast definitions set by the medical community, media representations is a way to start unpacking notions about how people with this kind of body were regarded by society and how they understood themselves. This is important when attempting an analysis of the dynamics of collecting practices.

Throughout the second half of the 19th century, there were short reports in the Stockholm-based daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter of ‘siamese twins’ born in other parts of the country and several adverts about touring so called ‘freak shows’, especially international ones. Among these were short reports about Chang and Eng Bunker, the original ‘siamese twins’. They were born 1811 in Siam, today’s Thailand, and after years of touring the world as a sideshow attraction, they settled in the USA. The Bunkers became famous both at home and on the European continent. They both married, had children and became homeowners and farmers, spending alternating nights in their respective homes. Chang and Eng themselves cultivated their individuality, marking their difference through property and social relations. They travelled the world and performed in front of an audience, putting themselves on display as a mean to earn an income. This was their way of making a living, by directing the audience’s gaze towards their extraordinary bodies. Yet their private lives were aligned with expectations on contemporary well-off middle-aged men. The fact that each had a family and a household to provide, leading such ordinary lives became part of the narrative of wonder.[1]

A black-and-white studio portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker, two middle-aged men with stern faces, joined at the abdomen, wearing suits.
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2330999

This raises questions about the construction and borders of normality, what does it mean to have a normal life? In the cases of the Bunker- and Hensel twins, normality is imagined as a way to participate in society and thus performed accordingly. Attention is centred at, yet drawn away from the shape of their bodies and instead directed onto what kind of activities they can do and which kinds of lives they can lead. In my research, I encounter only fragments of information about Swedish conjoined twins outside the medical sphere, most often filtered through the accounts of medical practitioners. Since my point of departure is anatomical collections as a mean to trace practices and attitudes, it is specimen jars on display in museums and used for research which dominates my field of view. They are produced in the context of medicine and mediates a specific narrative of what normal and deviant bodies are. I aim to look beyond these images and to include the agency of positions outside medicine in order to gain a more nuanced analysis.

One of the problems I face in trying to understand the shaping and negotiation of normality in my period and place of time is that it is very difficult to locate sources containing the voices of conjoined twins themselves, or the ones of their families. The easiest voices to find are the ones of scientists and medical practitioners, and I am worried that I will slip into the trap of reproducing only the narrative presented by them. Thus, framing the collected bodies as raw material for research and reproduce exoticism, as well as cement ideas about what constitutes ‘a normal body’. This struggle resonates with the one faced by Rana Hogarth, who in a previous blog post wrote about the issues of researching the history of slavery and how to tackle the asymmetry of records. What did it mean to give birth to conjoined twins, what were the consequences if they died, or survived, and which were the implications for the negotiation between the parents of deceased conjoined twins and the medical practitioners who wanted to collected the bodies for scientific purposes? These are questions I am hoping to be able to address and I consider disability research to be a powerful tool to steer the gaze away from the stories told by medical men, who had their own specific agendas, and instead ask what the lived experiences of conjoined twins themselves and those of their families were.

Since there is a scarcity of records of this, one way around is to look at how conjoined twins were portrayed in the media at the time (the Bunker-twins being the most famous example), as a way to raise new research questions which might direct me to source materials I’ve previously not thought of and a mean to reconfigure the framework. Another way is to aim for self-reflexivity and challenge my own subconscious preconceptions by watching stories told by conjoined twins in my own time, such as the Hensel-twins. There is a lot of power of in the choice of perspective and thus it is vital to shift back and forth between more than one during the research process, as well as being transparent in what kinds of choices we as historians make when writing history.

Helena Franzén is a PhD student within the project Medicine at the borders of life: Foetal research and the emergence of Ethical Controversy in Sweden, funded by the Swedish Research Council Dnr 446– 2014–1749. See http://medicalborders.se.

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Recommended Citation:
Helena Franzén (2018): “Just like everyone else”: Studying constructions of ‘normality’ through attitudes towards conjoined twins. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 11.

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