Pregnancy cravings
“visible disturbance” in the short term, over time such a diet caused a build-up of “deprav’d humours in the body”. This could lead to dropsy, cachexies (malnutrition and wasting), and other unpleasant symptoms.
For pregnant women, then, the dire effects of indulging their cravings had to be weighed against the dangers inherent in denying them, which could lead to “bad consequences happening to the child in the belly”. This posed a medical conundrum, one in which women were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.
But medical practitioners did offer some consolation to pica sufferers. According to the Scottish obstetrician and male midwife William Smellie, the dangers that the condition posed to the baby faded in the fourth month of pregnancy. And, in a bid to reduce the likelihood of pica leading to miscarriage, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives offered a remedy that “keeps the child from suffering by the mothers appetite”, made from the juice of vine leaves and syrup of quinces.
A taste for chalk and ashes
Pregnant women were not alone in being prone to pica. Medical writers frequently listed the condition as a symptom of greensickness, which is no longer a recognised condition. Known as ‘chlorosis’ in the 19th century, greensickness was peculiar to adolescent girls and was thought to be caused by the obstruction of menstruation or the retention of ‘seed’ within the body. This excess menstrual blood, it was believed, travelled to the digestive tract where it triggered the desire to consume unnatural foods.
Jane Sharp wrote of greensickness sufferers that they “will be always eating oatmeal, scrapings of the wall, earth, or ashes, or chalk, and will drink vinegar”. Likewise, Robert Johnson’s Manual of Physic reported that they ate “coals, ashes, clay, turfs, leather and I know not what”.
The popular reproduction manual Aristoteles Master-piece (1684) claimed, rather unusually, that it was the eating of chalk, oatmeal, tobacco-pipes, loam, starch, nutmegs, and drinking vinegar that caused the build up of undigested humours in the bowels, which then made the disease difficult to shake off. Consuming such foods, noted Sharp, would lead to girls’ bodies becoming “loose and spongy, and they grow lazy, and idle, and will hardly stir”.
Curing the condition in both unmarried and pregnant women necessitated emptying the stomach of the harmful matter that provoked the cravings. To this end, medical authors recommended that women were purged and made to vomit. Some writers
Greensickness sufferers consumed “coals, ashes, clay, turfs, leather and I know not what”