AUSTIN ÓMALLEY.
V
MATERNAL IMPRESSIONS
There is a wide-spread persuasion that a child, while carried in the womb of its mother, may be marked as the result of incidents that produce violent impressions upon her nervous system. This is so old a conviction in the human race and would seem to be substantiated by so much evidence that it is extremely difficult to convince people that there is no scientific basis for it. As a matter of fact, however, there is something mysterious about the way in which certain things that happen to the mother seem to affect the child in utero. As the result of the common belief in the truth of maternal impressions, mothers sometimes are prone to blame themselves for not having been sufficiently circumspect during the time of their pregnancy, and accordingly they may seek advice and consolation in the matter from clergymen. Women sometimes become very much depressed as a consequence of an unfortunate event of this kind, and as the simple truth is the best possible source of consolation, it would seem that a special chapter should be given to the subject in a work of this kind.
The evidence for the truth of the theory of maternal impression is almost entirely due to peculiar coincidences. James I. of England, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, could never stand, according to Sir Walter Scott, the sight of a drawn sword with equanimity, and it is said even that he nearly fainted at his coronation because of an unexpected glimpse of some naked blades in the hands of courtiers. This peculiarity was attributed to the fact that his mother, while carrying him in utero, had witnessed the violent death of her secretary, the unfortunate David Rizzio. There have been, however, any [{61}] number of men who paled at the sight of a drawn sword before and since James I., with regard to whom no such circumstantial story could be told to account for it. There have been any number of women that have witnessed bloody murders under circumstances quite as heartrending as those surrounding Mary Queen of Scots and her secretary, and yet their offspring, though at the time in utero, have not been disturbed at the sight of drawn swords, nor of blood or any other circumstance connected with the deep impression that must have been produced on their mothers.
There is, of course, a striking instance related in the Old Testament, which seems to make it very clear that a belief in maternal impressions existed from the very earliest times among the Israelites. The story of Jacob is well known: "Jacob took him rods of green poplar and of the hazel and chestnut tree and pilled white streaks in them and made the white appear which was in the rods, and he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, and the flocks conceived before the rods and brought forth cattle, ring-streaked, speckled and spotted." In this case it seems evident that Jacob was not looking for a miracle, but was expecting that a law of nature would be fulfilled in the matter, the influence of the unusual sight upon the animal mothers proving sufficient to have a definite effect upon their unborn offspring. The most ardent advocates of the power of maternal impressions would scarcely concede the existence of as much influence as this of the mother's mind over the child unborn, otherwise there would surely be a very absurd collection of anomalous births in the race.
On the other hand, it is generally conceded that the mother's habitual temper of mind and the thoughts with which she occupies herself may influence her unborn offspring to a most marked degree. The story is told of a child-murderer who delighted in fiendish deeds of cruelty and had murdered many people in cold blood, that his mother, the wife of a butcher, had delighted in watching the operation of slaughtering during the course of her pregnancy. There are any number of women, however, who have, by the necessities [{62}] of their occupation, had to witness the shedding of animal blood under such circumstances and yet without any special effect being noticeable in their offspring. It has been said that the opposite is also true, and that if a woman occupies herself with high and lofty thoughts, with noble deeds and unselfish devotion to others and if she occupies her mind and senses with the great works of art, a correspondingly beneficial effect will be noted upon the character of the foetus. These are, however, abstruse speculations leading to conclusions not founded upon actual observation, but upon theorising over the supposed fitness of things.
Coincidence plays such a large part in the matter of supposed maternal impressions that it is impossible to decide how much there is of fact and of consequence in the many stories that are told. Most women are a little afraid, as the time of their labour approaches, lest something or other—usually of an indefinite nature—that has happened during their pregnancy, may cause the marking of their child. When they find that the child is perfectly normal, they breathe a sigh of relief and forget all about it. If any anomaly is noted, however, then they are sure to connect it with some incident during pregnancy, and imagination is apt to lend details that confirm the supposed connection. On the other hand, there are not a few cases in which such anomalies have occurred, and good, sensible mothers have been unable to recall anything that might possibly serve to account for the peculiarity noticed in the child, though corresponding peculiarities in other children were supposed to be readily traceable to maternal impression. Even where there has been no foreboding of evil results, something or other that has occurred during the pregnancy will often be magnified enough by memory to account for the supposed maternal impression.
Doctors are very familiar with this tendency to make up stories to account for various deformities. It used to be considered that hip-joint disease and Pott's disease were the result of injuries in early life. They are now known to be due to tuberculous processes not necessarily and indeed only very seldom connected with injuries of any kind. Mothers are [{63}] nearly always able to account in some way, however, for the beginnings of the disease in some accident that has happened. Young children are apt to have so many falls that some one of them is picked out as the probable cause of the disease that subsequently manifests itself in the joints. It is just this state of affairs that occurs with regard to supposed maternal impression. Some incident that would be otherwise unthought of is magnified into an accident that caused a serious nervous shock, and consequently led to the marking of the child.
In general it may be said for the clergyman's direction, that if women have, as is sometimes the case, a morbid sense of their guiltiness with regard to some maternal impression that has set a mark upon their child, such a state of feeling may very well be rendered less poignant by a frank statement of the present attitude of mind of most physicians with regard to the possible effects of maternal impressions. Scepticism is much more the rule than it used to be, and as time goes on fewer and fewer of the cases that used to be considered so inexplicable in the direct relationship that seemed to exist between maternal impression and deformity in the child are reported. Fifty years ago nearly all the authorities on this subject were agreed in considering that maternal impressions did play some part, though they could not explain just how, in the production of certain deformities. Now we venture to say that most of the thinking physicians who have occupied themselves with this subject would scarcely hesitate to say that they were utterly incredulous of any such effects being produced. The lack of any direct nervous or blood connection between mother and child is the basis for such disbelief, and is of itself the best argument against the old tradition.