The Power of the imagination of pregnant women over the fetus . Although the fetus does not adhere directly to the womb; although it is only attached there by small external nipples to its membrane; although there is no communication between its brain and that of the mother — it has been claimed that everything that affected the mother also affected the fetus; that the impressions on one were carried over into the brain of the other. And to this influence have been attributed the resemblances, the monstrosities (either by addition, subtraction, or conformity against nature) that are often observed in different parts of the bodies of newborns, and above all birthmarks that are visible on the skin, all effects that, if they depended upon the imagination , ought much more reasonably to be attributed to that of the people who believe they perceive them than to the mother, who does not actually have, who is not susceptible of having, any power of this sort.

Nevertheless, on this subject the marvelous has been pushed as far as it can go. Not only have people wanted to believe that the fetus could carry the real representations of the appetites of its mother, but they have claimed further that, through a unique type of sympathy, the marks, the growths, in which some resemblance is found to fruits (for example, strawberries, cherries, blackberries) that the mother may have wanted to eat, change color, that their color becomes deeper during the season when the fruit ripens, and that the size of these representations seems to increase as it progresses. But with a little more attention and less preconception, one would see this color, or the size of the growths on the skin, change much less often. These changes must occur every time the movement of blood accelerates, and this effect is very simple. At the time when the heat makes fruit ripen these raised areas of the skin are always red or pale or livid because the blood gives these different tints to the skin depending on whether it flows through the veins in a greater or lesser quantity, and depending on whether these same veins are more or less condensed or slack, larger or smaller, more or less numerous; depending on variation in air temperature, which affects the surface of the body, and whether the skin tissue that covers the mark or the growth is found to be more or less compact or delicate.

If these marks or desires , as they are called, are caused by the appetite of the mother, which is represented by this or that object, why, asks M. de Buffon ( Histoire naturelle, vol. IV, chap. xi ) are their shapes and colors not as varied as the objects of these appetites? [1] What a lot of odd shapes would we not see if the vain desires of the mother were written on the skin of the child!

As our sensations do not at all resemble the objects that cause them, it is impossible that the fantasies, the fears, the aversion, the fright, in a word, any passion, any internal emotion could produce any real representation of these same objects; even less could it create or remove them from the organs as a consequence of these representations; a capacity that being extended throughout [the body] would unfortunately be just as often employed to destroy the individual in the mother’s womb in order to make a sacrifice to honor, which is to say, to prejudice, as to prevent any birth defects that it might have, or to achieve perfection. Moreover, it would happen virtually only to male babies; all women, for the most part, are affected by ideas, desires, things that have to do with that sex.

But as experience shows that the infant in the womb is in this regard as independent of the mother who carries it as the egg is of the hen who lays it, we can believe just about as readily, or just as little, that the imagination of a hen that sees a cock’s neck wrung, will produce in the eggs that she only warms, chicks with twisted necks; as one might believe the force of the imagination of a woman, who having seen the limbs of a criminal broken [at the wheel], gave birth to a child whose limbs by chance were found to be configured in a way that they appeared broken.

This example, which made such an impression on Father Malebranche, proves very little in favor of the power of the imagination in this case. [2] First, because the facts are uncertain; second, because it is not possible reasonably to understand that there is any way that the purported principle could produce such a phenomenon. Whether one wants to attribute it to physical influences, or one has recourse to mechanical means, it is impossible to explain it satisfactorily. Since the flow of the spirits in the brain of the mother does not communicate directly such that the modification could be preserved as far as the brain of the child; and since moreover we would agree about this communication, wouldn’t there be a better explanation for how it would be able to produce the effects in question on the limbs of the fetus? Could the action of the mother’s muscles, made to convulse by fright, horror, or any other cause, also ever produce on the body of the child enclosed within the womb, such determined effects (to be consistent), more precisely, on certain parts of the bones rather than others, and on bones that by their nature will otherwise bend or curve, rather than break? Can one conceive that similar mechanical effects, bearing on the fetus, could produce any other sort of alteration that could change the structure of certain organs rather than any others?

One thus cannot find any basis for this explanation of the phenomenon of the broken child; an explanation, moreover, that it is always audacious to undertake with regard to a fact that is extraordinary, uncertain, or at least about which we do not have much knowledge of the circumstances, except by supposing some vice of conformation, which would have happened independently of the spectacle of the wheel, with which it only agreed by giving rise to saying very inappropriately, post hoc, ergo propter hoc .  [3] The child with rickets, whose skeleton can be seen in the natural history museum of the King’s Garden [the Royal Botanical Garden in Paris], has the bones of the arms and legs marked by calluses midway up their length, on the inspection of which one can scarcely doubt that the bones of this child’s four limbs were broken while he was in his mother’s womb, without any mention being made of her having been a spectator of the torture of the wheel, or that they came together afterwards and formed the calluses.

The most extraordinary things, and those which happen rarely, says M. de Buffon ( see previous citation ), happen however as necessarily as ordinary things and those that happen very often. Among the infinite number of combinations that matter can take, the most unusual arrangements must be found and are in fact found, but much more rarely than the others; from this one can bet that out of a million infants that come into the world, for example, there will be one born with two heads, or with four legs, or with limbs that appear to be broken, or with whatever other deformity or peculiar monstrosity one would like to suppose. It can thus happen naturally, and without having to be attributed to the imagination of the mother, that an infant is born with the appearance of broken limbs, that several may be born thus without the mothers having attended the spectacle of the wheel; just as it can happen naturally that a mother whose child was formed with this defect brought it into the world after having seen this spectacle in the course of her pregnancy; such that this defect would never be remarked upon as an oddity except in the case of these two events coming together.

This is how it happens that every day babies are born with deformities of the skin, or of other parts [of the body], that are only noticed to the degree that they have had or that it is believed to see in them some relationship with some vivid emotion that the mother experienced while she was carrying the child in her womb. But it happens even more often that women who believe they are able to bring into the world children who are marked as a result of ideas, desires, with which their imagination was struck during their pregnancy, bring them into the world without any mark that has any relationship to the objects of these emotions, which is not mentioned even one in a thousand times. Or the connection is found between the memory of some fantasy that preceded it, and some defect it has — or to put it better, in which some relationship is found — with the idea with which the mother was struck. It was not an active imagination that produced the varieties that can be seen on formed stones, the agates, the dendrites: they were formed by the flow of a heterogeneous juice which insinuated itself into the different parts of the stone. As it found it easier to flow toward one part than toward another, toward some points of this part rather than toward others, its trace formed different designs. Now, this distribution being dependent on the arrangement of the parts of the stone, an arrangement that no free cause could direct, and which could vary, the route of the flow of this juice and the effect that resulted from it, are thus the pure effect of chance. See Chance.

If a similar principle can give rise in these bodies to fairly perfect resemblances with known objects, which however, have no relationship with them, there is nothing wrong with attributing to this blind cause the extraordinary designs that we see on the bodies of infants. It is proven that the imagination cannot trace anything on them; consequently, the defective or monstrous designs that are found on them depend on the efforts of fluids and the particular resistance or relaxation of the solids. These circumstances having no more disposition to be determined by a free cause than those which produce irregularities, defects, monstrosities in animals, in plants, in trees, they could vary infinitely and consequently make variations in the designs that follow them. If they seem to represent a red currant rather than a carnation, it is only the effect of chance. An event that depends on chance can be neither foreseen nor predicted; and the meeting of such an event with the prediction (which is fairly rare, one is commonly fooled in this regard), however perfect one might suppose it, can never be regarded as anything but a second effect of chance.

But it is enough to deal with the effects that credulity alone has made the subject of astonishment. We can predict, following the illustrious author of the natural history [Buffon], that in spite of the progress of Philosophy, and often even in spite of common sense, the facts under discussion here, as well as many others, will remain true for many people in terms of the consequences that are drawn from them. Prejudices, above all those which are based on the marvelous, will always triumph over the light of reason, and one would not be much of a philosopher if one were surprised by that.

As the marks on babies are often brought up in society [ dans le monde ], and since in society general and philosophical reasoning are less effective than little stories, we should not count on ever being able to persuade women that the marks on their babies have no relationship whatsoever with the ideas, the fantasies with which they were struck, the desires they were unable to satisfy. However, couldn’t we ask them, before the birth of the child: what were the objects of these ideas, these fantasies, these desires so often respected that they are imperious, and that are believed to be important, and that must thus be the marks that their child must bear. Whenever from time to time this question has been raised, people have been annoyed without being convinced.

However, since prejudice in this regard is very prejudicial to the sleep and the health of pregnant women, some scholars have thought they ought to undertake to destroy it. There is a dissertation by doctor Blondel, in the form of letters , published in Paris by Guérin (1745), translated from English into our language, which includes some very interesting things on this subject. But this author denies almost all the facts that seem favorable to the opinion that he combats. It can be proved very easily that they do not depend on the power of the imagination , but the majority are assured facts. They will always serve to fortify received ideas until someone makes known — that someone, that is, demonstrates — that they should not be attributed to this cause.

The memoirs of the Academy of Sciences include several dissertations on the same subject that are worthy no doubt of their scholarly authors and of the illustrious body that has published them; but as they always assume certain principles known only to physicians, they seem little made for those who are ignorant of these principles. Philosophical works aimed at the instruction of the vulgar, and of women above all, must be treated differently than a dissertation, and like legat ipsa Lycoris [something that Lycoris herself may read]. [4] This is what the author of the letters referred to above seems to have considered, in which the material seems to be well discussed and in a way that is accessible to everyone; which is all the more admirable since there is in fact no one who is not interested in becoming enlightened on this subject, which one also finds treated pretty well in Boerhaave’s Commentaires sur les institutions (paragraph 694) and in Haller’s notes (ibid.) where all the authors who have written and reported their observations on the effects attributed to the imagination of pregnant women are cited. [5] See Craving, Monster.

1. In the abridged English translation this quotation can be found in vol. 3, p. 293: George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Natural History: Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, etc . , 10 volumes (London, 1807-15). In fact, this whole article is based on Buffon’s discussion of the issue on pages 292-97.

2. Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Cartesian philosopher. For more information, see entry on him in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

3. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy that attributes causality to something simply because it happened before something else: A occurred, then B occurred; therefore, A caused B.

4. This quotation is from Eclogue 10 of Virgil’s Eclogues.

5. The reference is to Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738), Praelectiones academicae in proprias institutiones rei medicae, ed. with notes added by Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) (Turin, 1742-45), 4: 245 ff.