Miriam Calleja

The love of isolated study

Identifying the Pathogen: an inquiry is a collection of modern gothic poetry that intersperses Jennifer Militello’s corporeal experiences with those of Anna Morandi Manzolini—an 18th-century scientist and anatomist. It is a striking collection that drew me into deep study because it deliciously stitches together two moveable precisions.

Scientific knowledge can be considered concrete one day and obsolete the next. Reputations can ruin years of hard work overnight. A death can alter the future of whole communities. Being a woman comes with its parameters.

That’s exactly what happened to Manzolini when her husband Giovanni died of dropsy of the chest and corrosion of the liver. The Manzolini couple helped lead a resurgence in empirical science sponsored by Pope Benedict XIV and other politicians and noblemen in Bologna. They led this resurgence by dissecting hundreds of corpses and creating wax sculptures. They also pioneered a new method of approaching and bisecting organ systems for isolated study. This helped teach students more details on anatomy than ever before.

Anna became known as the Lady Anatomist, attracting the attention of international tourists and nobility, and receiving praise and recognition from the Pope. She went where no woman had gone. Despite this, Anna was not exempt from the gender realities of the time. She made significantly less money than male scientists for the same work. So, when her husband died, she struggled financially, even having to give up her eldest son to an orphanage.

One of the book’s most compelling achievements is its destabilization of scientific authority through the centering of a female scientist whose quest borders on obsession. Her drive to “identify the pathogen” exposes how classification itself can become a form of control, mirroring how women have been pathologized—hysterical, unwell, unreliable—when they name their own experiences.

Read through the lens of female equity, the book becomes less a “lab notebook” and more an indictment of who is allowed to diagnose, to name, and to survive. As I read the text for the second time, this poem stuck out, and I couldn’t help but be in dialogue with it. It felt, to me,  like a representative of Melitello’s Identifying the Pathogen: an inquiry in that held all the elements of the two women’s lives intertwined. As I like to do when editing work, I stretched the poem open and inserted my own thoughts. I conversed with it, and it was generous enough to tell me more.

time/day: transmutations

Here, the soft cycle ache trembles bright with its own limbs sovereign, floats stained like a

handful of seeds through the heart, showing its vortex flow, showing it the way Anna could have

clawed deep, armed with teeth otherworldly, armed with gears and husks mammalian and in flux.

A woman tries to drive to her dying mother. Imagines a world without mother, without creator.

The syntax is a shredded post.

Her hybrid dissections spring forth, plaiting a life with another, aren’t we one, even in split ends?

I am most unable.

The woman is one of a selection: the fuckup, the bitch, the shrew, the weirdo, the angry woman. We must place her in a slot of likeability. We still embrace the term. How can we take a scalpel and unsever ourselves from form?

I am a plantation I cannot articulate, growing with throats thrown empty in the ferment, growing

thick at the heal from walking on eggshells, avoiding my opinions, downsizing my ambitions

with terrible shapes and the deforestation spreading like a stain. If there were an edge,

I’d still clear from it. But everyone’s parameters sway differently and if we could dissect them,

millenniums would be present there. The past behaves. The past muscles its way in to spill like a

cliché worn too low on a promiscuous decolletage. The woman debuts herself as a

shipwreck or smash of clouds or gone jackdaws of blank.

The chest crushes, air balloons from the lungs, full of hubris, light as helium. A soft whistle.

I am extended bittersweet as the sift of a lullaby. The ache brings me. Pain names me like a

crush. Velvet moss, fungi-smell, lofty

bracken. There is no shallow here. There is only a try for the end where it summers. Only a

last chance to be loud to speak to forever hold your peace like a

forgetting on which we will depend. It gladdens and whistles. It corrupts such a canopy of

forgiveness, tiptoeing, our vestiges intertwined, putrid in this

hammer-stricken air.

Identifying the Pathogen is demanding and rewarding: the hybrid, notebook‑like structure invites the reader to participate in assembling meaning, much like piecing together a medical history obscured by bias. In doing so, this book becomes not just a portrait of illness, but a rigorously imagined argument that true diagnosis—and true healing—require equity in who speaks, who is believed, and whose bodies count as evidence.