ROBERT BURTON ON MATERNAL IMPRESSIONS (1621)

Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), one of the two books favored above all others by Sir William Osler, has ironically become one of the great entertainments among English writings. The irony, however, is accidental, because Burton, a joyful pessimist, wrote what has been called "undeniably one of the oddest, wittiest, and most learned books in English literature."1 Osler described the Anatomy as "the greatest medical treatise written by a layman."2 An example of Burton's views on the importance of maternal impressions, which would have been thoroughly approved of by the learned physicians of his day, follows:3 If she be over-dull, heavy, angry, peevish, discontented and melancholy, not only at the time of conception, but even all the while she carries the child in her womb, her son will be so likewise affected, and worse, as Lemnius adds, if she grieve over much, be disquieted, or by any casualty be affrighted and terrified by some fearful object heard or seen, she endangers her child, and spoils the temperature [temperament] of it; for the strange imagination of a woman works effectually upon her infant, that...she leaves a mark upon it, which is most especially seen in such as prodigiously long for such and such meats; the child will love those meats... and be addicted to like humours. If a great-bellied woman see a hare, her child will often have an hare-lip, as we call it. Garcaeus hath a memorable example of one Thomas Nichell, born in the city of Brandenburg, 1551, "that went reeling and staggering all the days of his life, as if he would fall to the ground, because his mother being great with child saw a drunken man reeling in the street."