Our understanding of reproductive biology has come a long way.
In ancient Greece shepherds believed that if animals mated while facing north, their offspring would be males. Even though Aristotle was way ahead of his time in the science of biology, he endorsed this belief, because it was consistent with his conclusion that the temperature at the time of mating determined the sex of offspring, and for some reason he thought temperatures were higher if the animals’ backsides were facing south (the sunny side).
In Genesis there is a story about the shepherd Jacob who made a deal with his father-in-law that he (Jacob) would keep all the speckled and spotted offspring of the flocks as his wages. Jacob then placed strips of peeled sapling branches in the animals’ watering trough, so that by looking at the strips while drinking the animals would have lambs and kids that were striped and speckled. There is no suggestion in the story that anything miraculous happened. It was just a case of Jacob being a clever shepherd.
These sorts of beliefs carried forward into the Middle Ages when it was believed that a pregnant woman’s thoughts or experiences could imprint themselves on the unborn child. A child born with a strawberry-shaped birthmark was believed to be the result of the pregnant woman eating or craving strawberries, for example. Likewise, it was feared that a woman who was startled by a frog while pregnant might give birth to a child with webbed feet. A woman who stared too long at a portrait of Christ might give birth to a bearded child. A woman who looked at a drawing of a monster might give birth to a monstrous child. This notion of “maternal imagination” was not just folk beliefs, but was endorsed by scientists, philosophers, and physicians.
Because of the concern with “maternal imagination” pregnant women were encouraged to avoid attending public executions, or seeing anything gruesome, in order to protect the appearance of the baby. For unvirtuous women there was a potential benefit to maternal imagination—imagining one’s husband while with one’s lover would supposedly assure that any child resulting from the affair would favor the woman’s husband.
No doubt we still have plenty to learn, but we’ve come a long way.
The images are a depiction of a London woman named Mary Toth giving birth in 1726 to a litter of rabbits after having become obsessed with rabbits during her pregnancy, and an illustration from a 1704 popular home medical book called “Aristotle’s Masterpiece” (even though it was not authored by Aristotle) depicting “the effigies of a maid all hairy, and an infant that was black, by the imagination of their parents.”
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