In 1815, a young surgeon named Nathaniel Highmore, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, published a thirty-page pamphlet: Case of A Foetus found in the Abdomen of a Young Man at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire. The pamphlet comes at an interesting time in the history of medicine, where key discoveries about bacteriology, virology and basic sterility had yet to be discovered; yet as a field, medicine had formalized into a discipline and had adopted the language of empiricism and descriptive precision. Shane Miler argues that Highmore’s pamphlet was an effort to demonstrate the superior explanatory power of medical science, and, in turn the goals of the Enlightenment project. Yet Highmore's use of Gothic stylistic elements disrupted his intended message and inadvertently presented the alternative Gothic reading as a disturbing, but ultimately preferable way, to make sense of medical anomalies.

Shane Miller, Ph.D. serves as the chair of the Communication Department at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University and is a former director of the Gender Studies program. His teaching and research is in the area of rhetorical criticism and public address, with special interests in sports, monstrosity, and gender. He received an Enduring Questions Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop an ethics course "What is a Monster?" and his current research examines the ways in which tropes of monstrosity are deployed and challenged in representations of the ambiguous human body.