There has been a frequent tendency, more especially among primitive peoples, to regard a pregnant woman’s longings as something sacred and to be indulged, all the more, no doubt, as they are usually of a simple and harmless character.  In the Black Forest, according to Ploss and Bartels, a pregnant woman may go freely into other people’s gardens and take fruit, provided she eats it on the spot, and very similar privileges are accorded to her elsewhere.  Old English opinion, as reflected, for instance, in Ben Jonson’s plays (as Dr. Harriet C.B.  Alexander has pointed out), regards the pregnant woman as not responsible for her longings, and Kiernan remarks ("Kleptomania and Collectivism,” Alienist and Neurologist, November, 1902) that this is in “a most natural and just view.”  In France at the Revolution a law of the 28th Germinal, in the year III, to some extent admitted the irresponsibility of the pregnant woman generally,—­following the classic precedent, by which a woman could not be brought before a court of justice so long as she was pregnant,—­but the Napoleonic code, never tender to women, abrogated this.  Pinard does not consider that the longings of pregnant women are irresistible, and, consequently, regards the pregnant woman as responsible.  This is probably the view most widely held.  In any case these longings seldom come up for medico-legal consideration.

The phenomena of the longings of pregnancy are linked to the much more obscure and dubious phenomena of the influence of maternal impressions on the child within the womb.  It is true, indeed, that there is no real connection whatever between these two groups of manifestations, but they have been so widely and for so long closely associated in the popular mind that it is convenient to pass directly from one to the other.  The same name is sometimes given to the two manifestations; thus in France a pregnant longing is an envie, while a mother’s mark on the child is also called an envie, because it is supposed to be due to the mother’s unsatisfied longing.

The conception of a “maternal impression” (the German Versehen) rests on the belief that a powerful mental influence working on the mother’s mind may produce an impression, either general or definite, on the child she is carrying.  It makes a great deal of difference whether the effect of the impression on the child is general, or definite and circumscribed.  It is not difficult to believe that a general effect—­even, as Sir Arthur Mitchell first gave good reason for believing, idiocy—­may be produced on the child by strong and prolonged emotional influence working on the mother, because such general influence may be transmitted through a deteriorated blood-stream.  But it is impossible at present to understand how a definite and limited influence working on the mother could produce a definite and limited effect on the child, for there are no channels of nervous communications for the passage of such influences.  Our difficulty in conceiving of the process must, however, be put aside if the fact itself can be demonstrated by convincing evidence.