The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latin and compared with the French. by Tho: Johnson. Whereunto are added three tractates our of Adrianus Spigelius of the veines, arteries, & nerves, with large figures. Also a table of the bookes and chapters.

CHAP. VII. Of Monsters which take their cause and shape by imagination.

THe Antients having diligently sought into all the secrets of nature,* 1.1 have marked and ob∣served other causes of the generation of Monsters: for, understanding the force of ima∣gination to be so powerful in us, as for the most part, it may alter the body of them that imagine, they soon perswaded themselves that the faculty which formeth the infant may be led and governed by the firm and strong cogitation of the Parents begetting them (often deluded by nocturnal and deceitful apparitions) or by the mother conceiving them; and so that which is strongly conceived in the minde, imprints the force into the infant conceived in the womb: which thing many think to be confirmed by Moses, because he tells that Jacob encreased and bettered the part of the sheep granted to him by Laban, his wives father, by putting rods,* 1.2 having the bark in part pulled off, finely streaked with white and green, in the places where they used to drink, especially at the time they engendred, that the representation apprehended in the conception, should be presently impressed in the young; for the force of imagination hath so much power over the infant, that it sets upon it the notes or characters of the thing conceived.

We have read in Heliodorus, that Persia Queen of Aethiopia, by her husband Hidustes, being also an Ethiope, had a daughter of a white complexion; because in the embraces of her husband, by which she proved with childe, she earnestly fixed her eye and minde upon the picture of then fair Andromeda standing opposite to her. Damascene reports, that he saw a maid hairy like a Bear, which had that deformity by no other cause or occasion then that her mother earnestly beheld in the very instant of receiving and conceiving the seed, the image of S. John covered with a Camels skin, hanging upon the posts of the bed.

They say, Hippocrates by this explication of the causes, freed a certain noble woman from suspition of adultery, who being white her self, and her husband also white, brought forth a childe as black as an Ethiopian, because in copulation she strongly and continually had in her minde the picture of the Ethiope.

[illustration]

The effigies of a maid all hairy, and an infant that was black by the imagination of their Parents.

There are some who think the infant once formed in the womb, which is done at the utmost within two and forty dayes after the conception, is in no danger of the mothers imagination, neither of the seed of the father which is cast into the womb; because when it hath got a perfect figure, it cannot be altered with any external form of things; which whether it be true, or no, is not here to be inquired of: truly I think it best to keep the woman, all the time she goeth with childe, from the sight of such shapes and figures.

In Stequer a village of Saxony, they say, a monster was born, with four feet, eyes, mouth and nose like a calf, with a round and red excrescence of flesh on the forehead, and also a piece of flesh like a hood hung from his neck upon his back, and it was deformed with its thighs torn and cut.

[illustration]

The effigies of a horrid Monster, having feet, hands and other parts like a Calf.

[illustration]

The effigies of an infant with a face like a Frog.

Anno Dom. 1517. in the parish of Kings-wood, in the forrest Biera, in the way to Fonteau-Bleau, there was a monster born, with the face of a Frog, being seen by John Bellanger, Chirurgian to the Kings Engineers, before the Justices of the town of Harmony, principally John Bribon the Kings procurator in that place. The fathers name was Amadaeus the Little, his mothers Magda∣lene Sarbucata, who troubled with a fever, by a womans perswasion, held a quick frog in her hand until it died; she came thus to bed with her husband and conceived; Bellanger, a man of an acute wit, thought this was the cause of the monstrous deformity of the childe.

Notes

• * 1.1

  The force of imagination upon the body and humors.
• * 1.2

  Gen. cap. 30.