Maternal Impression, Preformationism, and Outdated Science

Maternal impression was one of those crazy theories concocted in Greco-Roman times to explain the discrepancy that may emerge between a child and the parents. Rooted in the theory that in the act of conception, whatever the mother was looking at will influence how the offspring will appear, the notion of maternal impression was commonly cited by Roman male writers to explain their "discolored" children with their wives, a joke about elite Roman women sleeping with black, or, "Ethiopian" slaves (Thompson's Romans and Blacks contains several delightful anecdotes of Roman-Latin writings on the theme of white aristocratic, elite women engaging in sex with low, black slaves working in the stables, partly because the very notion was considered absurd). Like the ludicrous theory held by some (such as Herodotus) that "Ethiopians" (dark-skinned Indians and Africans) had black semen like the color of their skin, which Aristotle discounted, the notion of maternal impression was used in what some allege is the world's first passing novel, Aethiopica, rediscovered in Europe in the 16th century (read wiki). In a 1640 painting, as this article from The Root indicates, the notion of the queen of Ethiopia's maternal impression led to her daughter with the black king turning out white because during lovemaking, she gazed upon a statue of Andromeda.

This notion of maternal impression and the extreme cases it was equated with (interracial and cross-racial births) also reminds me of another absurd notion of medieval Europe and alchemy, the idea that an embryo was growing within the male semen, and the woman as merely a vessel for insemination! This absurdity included images drawn that made it seem as if semen included tiny embryos! According to this wiki page, such a theory was called preformationism, the theory that living organisms developed from miniscule fully-developed versions of their later, larger forms. The strangest thing about these theories is that people believed in them for thousands of years in some cases, though mostly before the birth of cell theory and advanced biology.