s to have been the
famous anatomist, Realdus Columbus, who was a professor at Padua, Pisa,
and Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the same century,
however, another and not less famous Neapolitan, Della Porta, for the
first time formulated a definite theory of maternal impressions. A little
later, early in the seventeenth century, a philosophic physician at Padua,
Fortunatus Licetus, took up an intermediate position which still finds,
perhaps reasonably, a great many adherents. He recognized that a very
frequent cause of malformation in the child is to be found in morbid
antenatal conditions, but at the same time was not prepared to deny
absolutely and in every case the influence of maternal impression on such
conditions. Malebranche, the Platonic philosopher, allowed the greatest
extension to the power of the maternal imagination. In the eighteenth
century, however, the new spirit of free inquiry, of radical criticism,
and unfettered logic, led to a sceptical attitude toward this ancient
belief then flourishing vigorously.[190] In 1727, a few years after
Malebranche's death, James Blondel, a physician of extreme acuteness, who
had been born in Paris, was educated at Leyden, and practiced in London,
published the first methodical and thorough attack on the doctrine of
maternal impressions, _The Strength of Imagination of Pregnant Women
Examined_, and exercised his great ability in ridiculing it. Haller,
Roederer, and Soemmering followed in the steps of Blondel, and were either
sceptical or hostile to the ancient belief. Blumenbach, however, admitted
the influence of maternal impressions. Erasmus Darwin, as well as Goethe
in his _Wahlverwandtschaften_, even accepted the influence of paternal
impressions on the child. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the
majority of physicians were inclined to relegate maternal impressions to
the region of superstition. Yet the exceptions were of notable importance.
Burdach, when all deductions were made, still found it necessary to retain
the belief in maternal impressions, and Von Baer, the founder of
embryology, also accepted it, supported by a case, occurring in his own
sister, which he was able to investigate before the child's birth. L.W.T.
Bischoff, also, while submitting the doctrine to acute criticism, found it
impossible to reject maternal impressions absolutely, and he remarked that
the number of adherents to the doctrine was showing a tendency to increas