Unless she is immured or isolated from the world, nearly every expectant
mother sees many sights of the kind that, according to popular
tradition, cause "marks." Why is it that results are so few? Why is it
that women doctors and nurses, who are constantly exposed to unpleasant
sights, have children that do not differ from those of other mothers?
Darwin, who knew how to think scientifically, saw that this is the
logical line of proof or disproof. When Sir Joseph Hooker, the botanist
and geologist who was his closest friend, wrote of a supposed case of
maternal impression, one of his kinswomen having insisted that a mole
which appeared on her child was the effect of fright upon herself for
having, before the birth of the child, blotted with sepia a copy of
Turner's _Liber Studiorum_ that had been lent her with special
injunctions to be careful, Darwin[27] replied: "I should be very much
obliged, if at any future or leisure time you could tell me on what you
ground your doubtful belief in imagination of a mother affecting her
offspring. I have attended to the several statements scattered about,
but do not believe in more than accidental coincidences. W. Hunter told
my father, then in a lying-in hospital, that in many thousand cases he
had asked the mother, before her confinement, whether anything had
affected her imagination, and recorded the answers; and absolutely not
one case came right, though, when the child was anything remarkable,
they afterwards made the cap to fit.
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