In 1650 the doctor Thomas Willis was referred to as to the Falkam family in Oxfordshire on an pressing name. Mrs Falkam, a ‘girl of excellent household, aged about 20’, was six months pregnant when she ‘fell into an beautiful tertian fever’. The fever, Willis shortly ascertained, was brought on by Mrs Falkam’s ‘gulping down raw liquid [perhaps vinegar] on account of an insistent pica’. Willis prescribed a vomit and ordered his affected person to maintain to a ‘strict weight loss plan’, forgoing her unusual cravings.
The definition of pica has modified little or no since Willis’ day, categorized at this time by the American Psychiatric Affiliation as an consuming dysfunction involving the ‘persistent consuming of non-nutritive substances’. In 1651 the favored medical author Nicholas Culpeper differentiated pica from common being pregnant cravings by defining it as a ‘wicked’ and ‘evil urge for food’, the ‘need to eat absurd issues’ together with ‘uncooked corn, chalk, ashes, lime, earth, clay’. Physicians described the archetypal pica sufferers as pregnant ladies and women affected by menstrual disturbances. In Culpeper’s 1655 translation of Lazare Rivière’s Follow of Physick, pica was depicted as ‘correct and peculiar’ to ladies as a result of their ‘weak point of thoughts, and tenderness’, ‘seldom’ impacting males.
In early trendy society the pregnant physique stood in an ambiguous relationship to marriage and motherhood. Neither absolutely mom nor absolutely spouse, it defied the management of each husband and physician because the invisible little one grew within the womb. Earlier than trendy medical testing, neither the viability of a being pregnant nor the all-important id of the daddy might be absolutely confirmed, creating anxiousness for husbands and docs.
On this context, pica served as an vital – if ambiguous – signal of being pregnant. Following the traditional authority of Hippocrates and Galen, who in his second-century On the Causes of Signs had described how pica ‘happens particularly in ladies affected by unhealthy humours, every time they’re pregnant’, early trendy physicians prompt that being pregnant pica was brought on by blood diverting to the foetus. As a result of this refined blood nurtured the kid, the pure purgative of menstruation paused, and any remaining ‘impure’ blood couldn’t go away the physique. Early trendy medical texts due to this fact persistently blamed being pregnant pica on the corrupted feminine inside, stuffed with impurities which threatened the rising little one. The French obstetrician Jacques Guillemeau argued in 1612 that pregnant ladies are ‘filled with divers excrements, and unwell humours; and in line with the qualitie they’ve, the Lady with little one, longeth after the like’.
The secrets and techniques of the womb might be exhausting to interpret, even for educated physicians. Whereas Culpeper thought of pica one of many ‘chiefest signal[s] of conception’, it may additionally point out and even trigger a miscarriage and was often seen as a marker of virginity. This might produce difficulties for each practitioners and victims. In The Sicke Womans Personal Wanting-Glasse, a 1635 textual content aimed toward ladies, the doctor John Sadler acknowledged that ‘the signes of a breeding girl, and of 1 that beareth a mole [a false pregnancy] are all one’, together with her ‘disordinate longing referred to as Pica’. Rivière asserted that even when they didn’t miscarry, pica victims risked bearing ‘diseased, and weak’ youngsters.
Given these dangers, physicians writing on the suitable routine for pregnant ladies, together with their weight loss plan, train, and sexual exercise, debated extensively about whether or not ladies needs to be allowed to indulge their longings. Asserting that girls ‘should grasp’ their cravings, Guillemeau linked pica to ladies’s ethical in addition to physiological weak point. Ladies have been believed to be much less rational and extra sexually voracious than males, with the Bible instructing that ‘three issues are by no means glad: hell, a lady’s womb, and the earth’. The story of Eve consuming the apple of the Tree of Information additionally offered a template for ladies’s susceptibility to each dietary and ethical transgression, fostering a deep cultural suspicion about ladies’s appetites which might be seen in descriptions of pica victims. The 1684 gynaecological treatise Aristotle’s Masterpiece, for instance, described pregnant ladies who ‘covet, and greedily lengthy for issues opposite to the Nutriment, as Coals, Garbage, Chalk, Lime, Starch, Oat-meal, uncooked Flesh and Fish, or the like’.
The lurid language used to explain pica typically tipped into horror; the Golden Follow of Physick (1664) referred to as pica a ‘vicious Urge for food’ during which ‘some love uncooked flesh like Meneaters, some have been like beasts and bitten peoples Arms by violence’, whereas the time period ‘ravenous’ was usually utilized to victims. Some went as far as to counsel that girls with pica may have interaction in cannibalism. Culpeper reported the disturbing case of a pregnant girl ‘that longed for her husbands flesh, and although she beloved him very nicely; she killed him, eat half, and poudered up the remainder’.
Culpeper’s cannibal spouse was not a one-off anecdote. In Guillemeau’s phrases, pica in its most excessive type brought about ladies to ‘lengthy after Mans flesh’, and William Salmon’s 1694 translation of Isbrand van Diemerbroeck’s Anatomy of Human Our bodies prompt that girls with pica typically need ‘the fleshy and brawny a part of the Members of a residing Man’. But whereas pica was recognized and handled in apply, there isn’t any proof that the cannibalism anecdote was primarily based on an actual case. This was a medical ethical panic, mapped atop a dysfunction which impacted actual ladies.
One other issue fuelling this panic may be modern concern round cannibalism. Culpeper’s disturbing anecdote evokes the so-called barbarians newly found on the borders of European consciousness. A minimum of one work, the dietitian Thomas Muffet’s Well being’s Enchancment (1655), made this specific: ‘What’s extra disagreeable to most mens natures, then the style of humane flesh? But not onely some ladies with little one have longed for it, but additionally the entire nation of Canibals account it the sweetest meat of all others’.
Seventeenth-century ladies equivalent to Mrs Falkam actually did endure from pica, and from the few case notes that survive it appears docs equivalent to Willis have been largely sympathetic to their sufferers. Nonetheless, the ethical panic over pica in medical texts says a lot about early trendy attitudes in direction of the reproductive physique, suggesting a deep concern with the facility of the pregnant girl: the facility over life itself.
Helena C. Aeberli is a PhD researcher in early trendy consuming issues at Magdalen Faculty, Oxford.
