In 1731 Schurig, in his Syllepsilogia, devoted more than a hundred pages (cap. IX) to summarizing a vast number of curious cases of maternal impressions leading to birth-marks of all kinds.
J. W. Ballantyne has written an excellent history of the doctrine of maternal impressions, reprinted in his Manual of Antenatal Pathology: The Embryo, 1904, Chapter IX; he gives a bibliography of 381 items. In Germany the history of the question has been written by Dr. Iwan Bloch (under the pseudonym of Gerhard von Welsenburg), Das Versehen der Frauen, 1899. Cf., in French, G. Variot, "Origine des Préjugés Populaires sur les Envies," Bulletin Société d'Anthropologie, Paris, June 18, 1891. Variot rejects the doctrine absolutely, Bloch accepts it, Ballantyne speaks cautiously.
J. G. Kiernan has shown how many of the alleged cases are negatived by the failure to take this fact into consideration. (Journal of American Medical Association, December 9, 1899.)
J. Clifton Edgar, The Practice of Obstetrics, second edition, 1904, p. 296. In an important discussion of the question at the American Gynæcological Society in 1886, introduced by Fordyce Barker, various eminent gynæcologists declared in favor of the doctrine, more or less cautiously. (Transactions of the American Gynæcological Society, vol. xi, 1886, pp. 152-196.) Gould and Pyle, bringing forward some of the data on the question (Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, pp. 81, et seq.) state that the reality of the influence of maternal impressions seems fully established. On the other side, see G. W. Cook, American Journal of Obstetrics, September, 1889, and H. F. Lewis, ib., July, 1899.