The Embryography of Alice B. Toklas

When Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a medical student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she spent the autumn of 1901 constructing an anatomical model of a young human brain. Most accounts call it an “embryo” brain, although as we shall see it likely belonged to a fetus or infant. The assignment was her final opportunity to obtain the medical degree after failing four classes in the spring of her senior year. Her anatomy professor, Franklin Paine Mall (1982–1917), offered her a second chance to graduate if she would finish her brain model and write an accompanying manuscript. Stein eventually produced sixty-three drawings and “roughly twenty-five pages of text,” in addition to the model itself (Meyer 2001: 89). She submitted the work in January 1902, but Mall judged it as inept and threw it away. Stein set off for Europe, leaving medicine behind forever. She settled in Paris where she became an avant-garde writer most notably known for her book supposedly chronicling the life of Alice Babette Toklas (1877–1967), who was Stein's longtime lover, secretary, editor, cook, and companion. The book, published in 1933, narrated the life of the inimitable Gertrude Stein, although it was playfully titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.