Applied Eugenics

by Paul Popenoe; Roswell H. Johnson

Another is taken from a little publication which is devoted to eugenics.[26] As a "horrible example" the editor gives the case of Jesse Pomeroy, a murderer whom older readers will remember. His father, it appears, worked in a meat market. Before the birth of Jesse, his mother went daily to the shop to carry a luncheon to her husband, and her eyes naturally fell upon the bloody carcases hung about the walls. Inevitably, the sight of such things would produce bloody thoughts in the mind of the unborn child!

These are extreme cases; we quote from a medieval medical writer another case that carries the principle to its logical conclusion: A woman saw a Negro,—at that time a rarity in Europe. She immediately had a sickening suspicion that her child would be born with a black skin. To obviate the danger, she had a happy inspiration—she hastened home and washed her body all over with warm water. When the child appeared, his skin was found to be normally white—except between the fingers and toes, where it was black. His mother had failed to wash herself thoroughly in those places!

Of course, few of the cases now credited are as gross as this, but the principle involved remains the same.

We will take a hypothetical case of a common sort for the sake of clearness: the mother receives a wound on the arm; when her child is born it is found to have a scar of some sort at about the same place on the corresponding arm. Few mothers would fail to see the result of a maternal impression here. But how could this mark have been transmitted? This is not a question of the transmission of acquired characters through the germ-plasm, or anything of that sort, for the child was already formed when the mother was injured. One is obliged, therefore, to believe that the injury was in some way transmitted through the placenta, the only connection between the mother and the unborn child; and that it was then reproduced in some way in the child.

Here is a situation which, examined in the cold light of reason, puts a heavy enough strain on the credulity. Such an influence can reach the embryo only through the blood of the mother. Is it conceivable to any rational human being, that a scar, or what not, on the mother's body can be dissolved in her blood, pass through the placenta into the child's circulation, and then gather itself together into a definite scar on the infant's arm?

There is just as much reason to expect the child to grow to resemble the cow on whose milk it is fed after birth, as to expect it to grow to resemble its mother, because of prenatal influence, as the term is customarily used, for once development has begun, the child draws nothing more than nourishment from its mother.

Of course we are accustomed to the pious rejoinder that man must not expect to understand all the mysteries of life; and to hear vague talk about the wonder of wireless telegraphy. But wireless telegraphy is something very definite and tangible—there is little mystery about it. Waves of a given frequency are sent off, and caught by an instrument attuned to the same frequency. How any rational person can support a belief in maternal impressions by such an analogy, if he knows anything about anatomy and physiology, passes comprehension.

Now we are far from declaring that a reason can be found for everything that happens. Science does not refuse belief in an observed fact merely because it is unexplainable. But let us examine this case of maternal impressions a little further. What can be learned of the time element?

Immediately arises the significant fact that most of the marks, deformities and other effects which are credited to prenatal influence must on this hypothesis take place at a comparatively late period in the antenatal life of the child. The mother is frightened by a dog; the child is born with a dog-face. If it be asked when her fright occurred, it is usually found that it was not earlier than the third month, more likely somewhere near the sixth.

But it ought to be well known that the development of all the main parts of the body has been completed at the end of the second month. At that time, the mother rarely does more than suspect the coming of the child, and events which she believes to "mark" the child, usually occur after the fourth or fifth month, when the child is substantially formed, and it is impossible that many of the effects supposed to occur could actually occur. Indeed, it is now believed that most errors of development, such as lead to the production of great physical defects, are due to some cause within the embryo itself, and that most of them take place in the first three or four weeks, when the mother is by no means likely to influence the course of embryological development by her mental attitude toward it, for the very good reason that she knows nothing about it.