Fiction | June 01, 1989

This story is not currently available online.

My Uncle Isaac’s sexuality, according to my father’s theory, had been marked by the half-woman. Isaac, at thirteen, would sneak into the basement of the Philadephia Medical Museum where a woman’s torso floated in formaldehye. It was 1933, and here–beneath the museum’s upper floors with their public exhibits–reasearch and training about venereal disease was taking place. In a reinforced glass case, at the back of a laboratory room filled with charts and diagrams of progressive syphilis, rested the half-woman, clean of infection except for a lesion on her left breast.

If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.

SEE THE ISSUE

SUGGESTED CONTENT