1. EXCESSIVE PLEASURES AND PAINS.--A woman during her time of pregnancy
should of all women be most carefully tended, and kept from violent
and excessive pleasures and pains; and at that time she should
cultivate gentleness, benevolence and kindness.
2. HEREDITARY EFFECTS.--Those who are born to become insane do not
necessarily spring from insane parents, or from any ancestry having
any apparent taint of lunacy in their blood, but they do receive from
their progenitors certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as
well as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould,
fix and shape their subsequent destinies. Hysteria in the mother may
develop insanity in the child, while drunkenness in the father may
impel epilepsy, or mania, in the son. Ungoverned passions in the
parents may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of
their children, and the bad treatment of the wife may produce sickly
or weak-minded children.
3. The influence of predominant passion may be transmitted from the
parent to the child, just as surely a similarity of looks. It has been
truly said that "the faculties which predominate in power and activity
in the parents, when the organic existence of the child commences,
determine its future mental disposition." A bad mental condition of
the mother may produce serious defects upon her unborn child.
4. The singular effects produced on the unborn child by the sudden
mental emotions of the mother are remarkable examples of a kind
of electrotyping on the sensitive surfaces of living forms. It is
doubtless true that the mind's action in such cases may increase or
diminish the molecular deposits in the several portions of the system.
The precise place which each separate particle assumes in the new
organic structure may be determined by the influence of thought or
feeling. Perfect love and perfect harmony should exist between wife
and husband during this vital period.
5. AN ILLUSTRATION.--If a sudden and powerful emotion of a woman's mind
exerts such an influence upon her stomach as to excite vomiting, and
upon her heart as almost to arrest its motion and induce fainting, can
we believe that it will have no effect upon her womb and the fragile
being contained within it? Facts and reason then, alike demonstrate
the reality of the influence, and much practical advantage would
result to both parent and child, were the conditions and extent of its
operations better understood.
6. Pregnant women should not be exposed to causes likely to distress
or otherwise strongly impress their minds. A consistent life with
worthy objects constantly kept in mind should be the aim and purpose
of every expectant mother.
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