The Experimental Conception Hospital: Dating Pregnancy and the Gothic Imagination

Abstract

The Experimental Conception Hospital is a fictional laboratory described in a note by Robert Lyall on the medical evidence given in the Gardner Peerage dispute (1825-26). This fantasy institution would discover the natural length of human gestation and ascertain from when and what to date conception, calculations which eluded the House of Lords Peerage Committee which heard the case. This article introduces the Gardner case and Lyall's writing about it, focusing on the Gothicism which emerges particularly in relation to the perceived secrecy of the female reproductive body. By considering Lyall's Experimental Conception Hospital alongside three other technologies-the Panopticon, the hot air balloon and anatomical drawings of the gravid uterus-this article discovers the anachronistic persistence of supposedly out-dated modes of thoughts around female sexuality and reproductive biology in an apparently hyper-modern moment.