The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother

by George H. Napheys

Professor J. Lewis Smith of Bellevue Hospital Medical College, New York, has met with the following cases:—An Irishwoman, of strong emotions and superstitions, was passing along a street, in the first months of her pregnancy, when she was accosted by a beggar, who raised her hand, destitute of thumb and fingers, and in 'God's name' asked for alms. The woman passed on, but, reflecting in whose name money was asked, felt that she had committed a great sin in refusing assistance. She returned to the place where she had met the beggar, and on different days, but never afterwards saw her. Harassed by the thought of her imaginary sin, so that for weeks, according to her statement, she was distressed by it, she approached her confinement. A female infant was born, otherwise perfect, but lacking the fingers and thumb of one hand. The deformed limb was on the same side, and it seemed to the mother to resemble precisely that of the beggar. In another case which Professor Smith met, a very similar malformation was attributed by the mother of the child to an accident occurring, during the time of her pregnancy, to a near relative, which necessitated amputation. He examined both of these children with defective limbs, and has no doubt of the truthfulness of the parents. In May, 1868, he removed a supernumerary thumb from an infant, whose mother, a baker's wife, gave the following history:—No one of the family, and no ancestor, to her knowledge, presented this deformity. In the early months of her pregnancy she sold bread from the counter, and nearly every day a child with a double thumb came in for a penny roll, presenting the penny between the thumb and the finger. After the third month she left the bakery, but the malformation was so impressed upon her mind, that she was not surprised to see it reproduced in her infant.

In all these cases the impression was produced in the early months of pregnancy; but many have been recorded in which malformations in the infant appeared distinctly traceable to strong mental emotions of the mother only a few months previous to confinement, these impressions having been persistent during the remaining period of the pregnancy, and giving rise to a full expectation on the part of the mother that the child would be affected in the particular manner which actually occurred. Professor Carpenter, the distinguished physiologist, is personally cognisant of a very striking case of the kind which occurred in the family of a near connection of his own.

All the above instances have been those of the effects of persistent mental emotion. But it is also true that violent and sudden emotion in the mother leaves sometimes its impress upon the unborn infant, although it may be quickly forgotten.

It is related on good authority that a lady, who during her pregnancy was struck with the unpleasant view of leeches applied to a relative's foot, gave birth to a child with the mark of a leech coiled up in the act of suction on the intended spot.

Dr. Delacoux of Paris says that, in the month of January 1825, he was called to attend a woman in the village of Batignoles, near Paris, who the evening before had been delivered of a six months' fœtus, horribly deformed. The upper lip was in a confused mass with the jaw and the gums, and the right leg was amputated at the middle, the stump having the form of a cone. The mother of this being, who was a cook, one morning, about the third month of her pregnancy, on entering the house where she was employed, was seized with horror at the sight of a porter with a hare-lip and an amputated leg.

At a meeting of the Society of Physicians at Berlin, in August 1868, Herr Dupré stated that a woman saw, in the first weeks of her third pregnancy, a boy with a hare-lip; and not only was the child she then carried born with a frightful hare-lip, but also three children subsequently. Another one, a woman in the fifth week of pregnancy, saw a sheep wounded, and with its bowels protruding. She was greatly shocked, and did not recover her composure for several days. She was delivered at term of a child, in other respects well developed, but lacking the walls of the abdomen.

Many remarkable instances have been collected of the power of imagination over the unborn offspring.

Ambrose Paré, the illustrious French surgeon of the sixteenth century, in one of his treatises devotes a chapter to the subject of 'monsters which take their cause and shape from imagination,' and was evidently a strong believer in this influence.

A black child is generally believed to have been born to Marie Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV., in consequence of a little negro page in her service having started from a hiding-place and stumbled over her dress early in her pregnancy. This child was educated at the convent of Moret, near Fontainebleau, where she took the veil, and where, till the shock of the Revolution, her portrait was shown.

Examples are given by authors of the force of desires in causing deformities in infants, and the formation upon them of fruits, such as apples, pears, grapes, and others, which the mother may have longed for.