Carel Brest van Kempen has extracted a few fascinating quotes from an old book he has. It’s titled Creative and Sexual Science, by a phrenologist and physiologist from 1870, and it contains some wonderful old examples of folk genetics.
President Bush would be pleased:
“Human and animal hybrids are denounced most terribly in the Bible; obviously because the mixing up of man with beast, or one beast species with another, deteriorates. Universal amalgamation would be disastrous.”
Although, unfortunately, he then goes on to use this as an argument against miscegenation.
Another lesson is that you shouldn’t deny pregnant women anything, or their longing will mark their child.
“A woman, some months before the birth of her child, longed for strawberries, which she could not obtain. Fearing that this might mark her child, and having heard that it would be marked where she then touched herself, she touched her hip. Before the child was born she predicted that it would have a mark resembling a strawberry, and be found on its hip, all of which proved to be true.”
Don’t let them see horrible things, either.
“Mrs. Lee, of London, Ont., saw Burly executed from her window; who, in swinging off, broke the rope, and fell with his face all black and blue from being choked. This horrid sight caused her to feel awfully; and her son, born three months afterwards, whenever anything occurs to excite his fears, becomes black and blue in the face, an instance of which the Author witnessed.”
And…uh-oh. Maybe George W. Bush won’t be so thrilled with this part.
“A child in Boston bears so striking a resemblance to a monkey, as to be observed by all. Its mother visited a menagerie while pregnant with it, when a monkey jumped on her shoulders.”
I think Carel needs to get busy and transcribe the whole thing onto the web. I know I’ll find these examples useful when I teach genetics this spring.
Reminds me of the section on human freaks and oddities in the old old book “Of Monsters and Marvels”
Wow, one of those highlighted sections details something that happened in my hometown, in fact, only about 1km from my window. Cornelius Burley (or Burleigh) was hanged (twice) in London, Ontario in 1830. One wonders in retrospect, since the rope snapped the first time and they strung him up again (double jeopardy?!), what the woman in the anecdote was doing watching.
The last person was executed in Middlesex County in 1951, much to my chagrin.
PZ You’re embarrassing us. You had this:
and this:
and you didn’t make a connection! It’s there on a plate for you.
OK, the monkeys might get upset, but I don’t think they read ScienceBlogs.
Bob
A favorite true story here is that my wife ate a huge strawberry the night before my daughter was born. Over the first few months of her life, my daughter developed a capillary haemangioma on her abdomen, luckily in a spot that’s covered by a swimsuit. For the last nine years we’ve joked about her carrying around mom’s strawberry.
My wife worked in a hospital 34 years ago while pregnant with our first child. An aide there kept her from going in a patient’s room because there was a stuffed toy monkey there, and “it’ll mark the baby!!!”
Folk biology in general is odd and has large elements of mythology in it (I suppose for cognitive anthropologists this is a chicken-and-egg problem).
For example most folk bought into racisms which seemed to be a natural consequence of evolutionary perspectives 1880-1930 (except that races have no biological coherence unlike species; and neither can be “ranked” of any scale of “progress”) – nonetheless ‘race’ seemed consistent with folk wisdom, usually accompanied by beliefs in racial ‘purity’ and eugenics, whereas basic biology leads to the data of hybrid vigor.
And it ain’t dead in popular culture yet. I finally got around to watching Whale Rider last night, first time. Lovely production, useful reminder of the interesting Maori culture – yet its basic story presumes pure genealogical blood-lines for leadership (only expanded from kings to queens too, of course) which could come straight from Grimm – or in parts from 1930’s Germany.
More folksy quirks: the discovery & use of early anesthetics should have been unanimously praised by all folk. But it wasn’t unanimous, for reasons hinted at here :
So widely appreciated was the achievement of painless surgery that in 1868 a Bostonian named Thomas Lee had a monument erected in the Public Garden “to commemorate the discovery that the inhaling of ether causes insensibility to pain.” … At the time, its commissioning was somewhat controversial — some deemed it inappropriate to celebrate man’s attempt to circumvent God’s law by eliminating pain.
Bottom line: biology boggles intuition. (Coulter boggles the mind, but not intuition.)
I think Carel needs to get busy and transcribe the whole thing onto the web. I know I’ll find these examples useful when I teach genetics this spring.
If I were him I’d sell my copy to Ann Coulter so she could slap her name on it and pass it off as her next book.
I remember in Fads & Falacies in the Name of Science, which I think is by Martin Gardner, a discussion of L. Ron Hubbard. The book was written in the early 1950’s. Dyanetics had been “discovered,” but not yet Scientology.
L. Ron’s ideas included the bad things that happen if you say the wrong thing to a pregnant woman, or if she says the wrong thing, because the fetus will overhear and get everything all confused.
Case in point: a women with a rash on her behind. Her mother had headaches while she was pregnant and kept asking for aspirin. Elron thought the fetus understood this as “ass-burn” and reproduced it when she grew up. Elron was quite worried about saying the wrong thing to unconscious people, too. Like be careful what you way when you give CPR…Anyway, maybe he’d been reading about the strawberry birth mark on the hip.
It seems there’s a blog featuring Prof. Fowler’s wisdom
I wonder why no one seems to have closely examined Bush’s claimed antipathy for human/animal hybrids.
Type 1 diabetics, for example, might be interested to consider that most of the insulin they use is now produced by E. coli bacteria into which human genes have been inserted by genetic engineering. That makes them true human/animal hybrids…
Actually, this reminded me of the classic Porky Pig cartoon done (IIRC) in conjunction with Salvador Dali (and introducing the Dodo).
In one scene, a three-headed ogre says, ‘My mother was frightened by a pawn-broker.’ It wasn’t until years later that I put the pieces together and got the joke.
First, pawn-brokers used to indicate their presence by hanging three balls in front of their shop (why? I don’t know).
Second, the ogre referenced the outdated belief that the mother’s experiences during pregnancy will affect the child.
Once I knew these tidbits of trivia, the joke became funny.
Cheers,
-Flex
thwaite: All science boggles (untutored) intuition – it would scarcely be useful if it was superficial and riddled with craziness like ordinary knowledge. As for the anesthetics thing, well, people opposed lightning rods too!
These “environmental influences on pregancy” folk things are also in the bible; isn’t there a story in Joshua with breeding striped cattle by exposing their mothers to striped rods?
Then there’s the joke from an old Konrad Lorenz book about the pregnant woman who was frightened at the zoo by a roaring grizzly bear . . . and when her baby was born, he had bare feet.
re: Flex
“First, pawn-brokers used to indicate their presence by hanging in front of their shops(why? I don”t know).”
the myth of St. Nicholaus ( santa claus) says on 3 succesive nights he walked by a house & threw a bag of gold coins through an open window so that the father of the 3 maidens inside could pay for his daughter’ weddings.
That’s Genesis 30, when Jacob is laboring for Laban:
Genesis 30:37-39 : “Then Jacob took fresh rods of poplar and almond and plane trees, and peeled white stripes in them, exposing the white which was in the rods. He set the rods which he had peeled in front of the flocks in the gutters, even in the watering troughs, where the flocks came to drink; and they mated when they came to drink. So the flocks mated by the rods, and the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and spotted.”