Janis PaUister, trans. and ed., Ambroise Pare on Monsters and Marvels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
38-42.
Chapter 9: AN EXAMPLE OF MONSTERS THAT ARE CREATED THROUGH THE IMAGINATION
The ancients, who sought out the secrets of Nature (i. e., Aristotle, Hippocrates, Empedocles), have taught of other causes for monstrous children and have referred them to the ardent and obstinate imagination [impression] that the mother might receive at the moment she conceived— through some object, or fantastic dream—of certain nocturnal visions that the man or woman have at the hour of conception. This is even verified by the authority of Moses (Chap. 30 [of Genesis]) when he shows how Jacob deceived his father-in-law Laban and enriched himself with his livestock by having rods barked and putting them in the watering trough, so that when the goats and ewes looked at these rods of various colors, they might form their young spotted in various colors: because the imagination has so much power over seed and reproduction that the stripe and character of them remain [imprinted] on the thing bred.
Whether true or not, Heliodorus (book 10, of his History of Ethiopia) writes that Persina, the Queen of Ethiopia, conceived by King Hidustes—both of them being
Ethiopians—a daughter who was white and this [occurred] because of the appearance of the beautiful Andromeda that she summoned up in her imagination, for she had a painting of her before her eyes during the embraces from which she became pregnant.
Damascene, a serious author, attests to having seen a girl as furry as a bear, whom the mother had bred thus deformed and hideous, for having looked too intensely at the image of Saint John [the Baptist] dressed in skins, along with his [own] body hair and beard, which picture was attached to the foot of her bed while she was conceiving.
For a similar reason Hippocrates saved a princess accused of adultery, because she had given birth to a child as black as a Moor, her husband and she both having white skin; which woman was was absolved upon Hippocrates’ persuasion that it was [caused by] the portrait of a Moor, similar to the child, which was customarily attached to her bed.
Moreover, one can observe that conies [rabbits] and peacocks who are closed up in white places, through the properties of the pagination, give birth to their white young.
As a result, it is necessary that women—at the hour of conception and when the child is not yet formed (which takes from thirty to thirty-five days for males and forty or forty-two, as Hippocrates says, for females)—not be forced to look at or to imagine monstrous things; but once the formation of the child is complete, even though the woman should look at or imagine monstrous things with intensity, nevertheless the imagination will not then play any role, because no transformation occurs at all, since the child is completely formed.
In Saxony in a village named Stecquer, a monster was born having the four feet of an ox; its eyes, mouth and nose similar to a calf, having on top of its head a red flesh, in a round shape; [and] another behind, similar to a monk’s hood, and having its thighs mangled.
In the year 1517, in the parish of Bois-le-Roy, in the Forest of Biere, on the road to Fontainebleau, a child was born having the face of a frog, who was seen and visited by Master Jean Bellanger, a surgeon in the company of the King’s Artillery, in the presence of gentlemen from the Court of Harmois: notably the honorable gentleman Jacques Bribon, the king’s procurer in said place; and Etienne Lardot, a bourgeois from Melun; and Jean de Vircy, king’s notary at Melun; and others. The father’s name is Esme Petit and the mother Magdaleine Sarboucat. The aforementioned Bellanger, a man of good wit, wanting to know the cause of the monster, inquired of the father what could have been the cause of it; the latter told him that he figured that his wife having a fever, one of her neighbor ladies advised her, in order to cure her fever, to take a live frog in her hand and hold it until said frog should die. That night she went to bed with her husband, still having said frog in her hand; her husband and she embraced and she conceived; and by the power of her imagination, this monster had thus been produced.
World History
