The Four Epochs of Woman's Life; A Study in HygieneGalbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Science
The Four Epochs of Woman's Life; A Study in Hygiene
Galbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Women -- Health and hygiene
The Influence of the Male Sexual Element on the Female Organism.-- Dr.
Alexander Harvey, of Aberdeen, has adopted the theory of fetal
inoculation. He believes that the effect is first due to the influence
of the male element upon the ovum, which, in consequence of the
subsequent close attachment and freely inter-communicating
blood-vessels between the modified embryo and the mother, inoculates
the condition of the mother with the qualities of the male; and so, on
the subsequent impregnation by another male, the offspring resembles
the first male and not its real parent. He even goes further, and says
that it is conceivable, by successive impregnations effected by him,
that the influence may be increased, and if so the younger children
begotten by him, rather than the elder, might be expected, ceteris
paribus, to bear their father's image. And as regards the mother, he
suggests the question, whether there is not something in the popular
notion that in the course of years the wife comes to resemble the
husband; and that not merely in respect of temper, disposition, or
habits of thought, but in bodily appearance, which may be referable to
this influence exerted by the husband on her constitution, through the
medium of the fetuses in utero.
"Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee
down.
He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel
force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."
Darwin, on the other hand, considers it a most improbable hypothesis
that the mere blood of one individual should affect the reproductive
organs of another individual in such a manner as to affect the
subsequent offspring. The analogy, he says, from the direct action of
the foreign pollen on the ovaries and seed coats of the mother plant
strongly supports the belief that the male element acts directly on
the reproductive organs of the female, and not through the
intervention of the crossed embryo.
Dr. John Brown, in reviewing the subject, says it must be conceded
that the male element has an influence on the female, over and above
its fertilizing influence upon the ovum. The limit of this influence
is at present unknown.
Heredity.-- Girls are more apt to resemble their fathers in mental
traits, disposition, and constitution; while boys take after their
mothers. Boys procreated by intelligent mothers will be intelligent;
while it does not always follow that the sons of intelligent fathers
are intelligent. The poets Burns, Ben Johnson, Goethe, Walter Scott,
Byron, and Lamartine were all born of women remarkable for vivacity
and brilliance of language.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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