Pregnancy cravings
Women can experience intense food cravings in pregnancy. They plough through pickles, gorge on eggs, fantasise about mustard, and devour entire tubs of ice cream. And if early modern writers and medical practitioners are to be believed, some have been known to hanker after human flesh.
Our predecessors in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were keenly aware of the link between pregnancy and food cravings, and devoted a great deal of time to analysing these urges – whether they were for traditional sources of sustenance or something altogether more unusual.
It was widely accepted that, in the words of the popular medical writer Nicholas Culpeper, cravings were one of the “chiefest sign[s] of conception”, and that what followed, according to the author John Sadler, would be “a longing desire for strange meats” (“meats” being a term to describe a range of foodstuffs).
The author of a satirical piece published in 1682, entitled The Ten Pleasures of Marriage, suggested that cravings were so common that “all women when they are with child; do fall commonly from one longing to another”. He complained to his readers – whom he assumed included the husbands of such women – that in the summer their wives would crave “China oranges, sivil lemmons, the largest asparagus, strawberries with wine and sugar, cherries of all sorts, and… plums”. These extravagant appetites were no cause for concern for the pregnant woman themselves, the author wrote. But, he bemoaned, it was a different story for the long-suffering husbands and servants who were required to “trot out” long after dark to procure such delicacies.
In John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, first performed around 1613–14, Daniel de Bosola attempts to discover if the eponymous duchess is pregnant by presenting her with a bowl of apricots, which were known to be a favourite of pregnant women. When she greedily devoured the gift, his suspicions were confirmed and made plain for all to see, as the apricots subsequently brought on the duchess’s labour pains.
An unfulfilled longing
As well as describing (often in great detail) women’s pregnancy cravings, early modern writers spent a great deal of time theorising about what they meant for both mother and child. Some concluded that denying such cravings could have negative consequences for the unborn baby. For example, they
Doctors believed that an unfulfilled craving for strawberries – depicted in a still life from 1704 – was a cause of red birthmarks
Pregnant women – like the one shown here shopping for beef in an engraving from 1710 – were advised to both listen to and ignore their cravings
from earth and ashes to coals and shells. Yet perhaps most unusually of all, some also apparently developed an appetite for human flesh. Jane Sharp wrote in her 1671 midwifery guide, The Midwives Book, that the seventh sign that a woman was with child was that “she hath a preternatural desire to something not fit to eat nor drink, as some women with child have longed to bite off a piece of their Husbands’ Buttocks”. Daniel Sennert’s Practical Physick (1664) even claimed that one woman, “though she loved him [her husband] very well, [had] killed him, eat part, and powdered the rest” to satisfy her desire for his flesh.
This tendency towards cannibalism was also mentioned in an English edition of Felix Platter’s medical text A Golden Practice of Physick, which warned that “some love raw flesh like meneaters, some have been like beasts and bitten peoples arms by violence”.
Vicious humours
Pica was evidently the cause of some consternation in early modern England. But medical experts disagreed as to how damaging the condition was to the sufferer herself. A number of books argued that the very cause of the problem – a build-up of vicious (or diseased) humours in the stomach – allowed women to digest these items safely. According to scientific thought at the time, the body was comprised of a balance of humours – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile – but these humours would corrupt if someone suffered from disease, or consumed too much food or drink that couldn’t be properly digested. One author described how the stomachs of women suffering from pica could “digest without any trouble or harm, a great many noxious and offensive objects”, provided that they didn’t eat in such vast quantities that their bodies were overwhelmed.
However, John Sadler offered a harsher warning about the condition, writing that the “eating of corrupt meates, as in the disordinate longing called pica, unto which breeding women are often subject” could cause a “schirrositie” (hard growths or fibrosis) or hardness to develop in the womb. Jane Sharp was similarly explicit that pregnant women had to be reasoned with, for if they couldn’t be dissuaded from eating such things then they would miscarry.
The idea that pica posed a serious threat to pregnant women endured over the decades, and a 1741 edition of Aristotle’s Works Completed copied Sadler’s sentiment verbatim. A posthumous edition of Michael Ettmüller’s medical treatise likewise offered stark warning about the dangers of this condition. It claimed that though eating “absurd and uncommon things” caused no