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In the various works usually grouped together under the general designation of "Hippocratic" are to be found the earliest opinions upon the subject of antenatal pathology which the medical literature of Greece has handed down to modern times.
We move, like marionettes, pulled by the strings of our forgotten antenatal deeds, in a magic cage, or Net, of false and hypocritical momentary seemings: and bitter disappointment is the inevitable doom of every soul, that with passion for its guide in the gloom, thinks to find in the shadows that surround it any substance, any solid satisfaction; any permanent in the mutable; any rest in the ceaseless revolution; any peace which the world cannot give.
Watch him in his hours of solitude, communing with great Nature for days and weeks in all her changing moods, and when at last his dream of beauty is realized and takes a clearly defined form, behold how patiently he works through long months and years on sky and lake, on tree and flower; and when complete, it represents to him more love and life, more hope and ambition, than the living child at his side, to whose conception and antenatal development not one soulful thought was ever given.
John Cowan says upon this subject: "The fundamental principles of genius in reproduction are that, through the rightly directed wills of the father and mother, preceding and during antenatal life, the child's form or body, character of mind and purity of soul are formed and established.
But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our homunculi and be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so.
There are those, and they are called men and women, whose profession is to devise ways to kill children before they are born. Yet, public sentiment consigns the murderer of post-natal children to the dungeon or the gallows, while the murderers of antenatal children are often allowed to pass in society as honest and honorable men and women.
Thomas mentions a case of antenatal development of nine teeth. Puech, Mattei, Dumas, Belluzi, and others report the eruption of teeth in the newborn. In Dumas' case the teeth had to be extracted on account of ulceration of the tongue. Instances of triple dentition late in life are quite numerous, many occurring after a hundred years.
On the other side, see G.W. Cook, American Journal of Obstetrics, September, 1889, and H.F. Lewis, ib., July, 1899. Transactions Edinburgh Obstetrical Society, vol. xvii, 1892. J.W. Ballantyne, Manual of Antenatal Pathology: The Embryo, p. 45. W.C. Dabney, "Maternal Impressions," Keating's Cyclopædia of Diseases of Children, vol. i, 1889, pp. 191-216.
She was a human chicken that had begun to be aware of herself, but had not yet attacked the shell that enclosed her: because it was transparent, and she could see life about her, she did not know that she was in a shell, or that, if she did not put forth the might of her own life, she was sealing herself up, a life in death, in her antenatal coffin.
And there the survivors sit, beside the silent stream, beneath the tropic moon; sun-dried and lean, but strong and bold as ever, with the quiet fire of English courage burning undimmed in every eye, and the genial smile of English mirth fresh on every lip; making a jest of danger and a sport of toil, as cheerily as when they sailed over the bar of Bideford, in days which seem to belong to some antenatal life.
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