The 19th century “doctrine of maternal impression” held that a woman’s thoughts and experiences could physically mark her child. Someone born with a strawberry shaped birthmark must have had a mother who craved strawberries during birth. The family of Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man, said publicly that his disability was caused by his pregnant mother’s fearful encounter with an elephant.

This pseudoscience was promoted by the medical manuals of the day, according to cultural historian Karen Weingarten, and by American doctors long after their British counterparts dropped it. One 1869 book, George H. Napheys’ “The Physical Life of Woman,” warned that children would be born “idiotic or deformed” from “the influence of some severe mental shock received by the mother during her

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