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Updated: May 2, 2025
During gestation she manifested great uneasiness of mind, lest the birth of a mulatto offspring should disclose her conduct.... It so happened that her negro husband possessed a sixth digit on each hand, but there was no peculiarity of any kind in the white man, yet when the mulatto child was born it actually presented the deformity of a supernumerary finger. Taruffi, the celebrated Italian teratologist, in speaking of the subject, says: 'Our knowledge of this strange fact is by no means recent for Fienus, in 1608, said that most of the children born in adultery have a greater resemblance to the legal than to the real father' an observation that was confirmed by the philosopher Vanini and by the naturalist Ambrosini.
In 1620, Digby's last year of study at Oxford University, Fienus published a work, De Formatrice Foetus, designed to demonstrate that the human embryo receives the rational soul on the third day after conception and to discuss at length such subjects as the efficient cause of embryogeny and the proposition that the conformation of the fetus is a vital, not a natural, action.
Fienus, in his curious little book, de Viribus Imaginationis, records from Donatus the case of a man, who fancied his body encreased to such a size, that he durst not attempt to pass through the door of his chamber.
Great writers applauded Fienus and his successors; universities favored their views; the Benedictines, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits supported them. Modern science claims to have proved beyond all doubt that the same soul animates the man that animated the fœtus from the very moment of conception. The "Medical Jurisprudence" of Wharton and Stillé quotes Dr.
All this sounds very foolish now; and yet we should not sneer at their ignorance; had we lived in their times, we could probably have done no better than they. It was not till 1620 that Fienus, a physician of Louvain, in Belgium, published the first book of modern times that came near the truth. He maintained that the human soul was created and infused into the embryo three days after conception.
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