ABSTRACT
In 1713, Richard Waller registered his skepticism about Cotton Mather’s belief that a mother’s imagination could influence her unborn child, “But how this vis Imaginationis [power of the imagination] should act upon the foetus seemes at least a hard probleme. For I doubt [or suspect] the macula materna upon a due examination will be found to proceed rather from the Imagination of others than the persons affected thus.”1 Waller jokes that the imagination of Mather rather than that of the pregnant woman creates the situation he describes. Waller does not believe Mather’s “Histories” of the “Maculae Maternae,” for instance, that a “Woman longing for Peas, but refusing to gratifie her desire, for fear of a sort of Bug … this Woman’s Child, when born, had an Excrescence on the Forehead, resembling one of those Peas,” published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1714.2 It should be noted, however, that Waller’s skepticism was not at all typical of the Society and the Transactions: the records of the Society in the seventeenth century and articles in the Transactions printed between 1666 and 1760 consistently affirm the power of the mother’s imagination to change the fetus. In fact, Waller highlights “maculae maternae” as a noteworthy aspect of his entries on “Generation” in his Index. So Hans Sloane includes specimen #662 in his “Humana” collection: “A foetus of 7 months old resembling a monkey with a cloak which the woman saw playing tricks at Rochester. Given to me by Dr. Gregory.”3
