This chapter addresses the premodern history of maternal impressions, the enduring belief that the emotions and experiences of a pregnant woman could leave permanent marks on her unborn child. The idea of the reactive womb has been present across multiple cultures, geographies, and centuries; however, it contrasts starkly against the recent view of the womb as boundaried. While we are not suggesting that maternal impression is a direct predecessor of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), with this overview we are reminding of the ubiquitous interest in pregnancy as ’an active project requiring self-discipline and work on the part of expectant mothers’ (1) in multiple medical systems. We focus on Greek, Roman, Latin Mediaeval, Jewish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Ayurvedic sources before and alongside the rise of modern biomedicine and analyse their view of the pregnant female body. We locate our reading in the wider context of a cross-cultural perception of body porosity and the power of environmental factors to shape the physical and moral traits of people. By delving into historical examples and engaging a longue durée perspective, this chapter aims to situate the current postgenomic claims linked with DOHaD findings that ‘soft inheritance has now been reborn’ (2).

From the Iberian colonization on, the American Indians were understood based on their skin color and the place where they were living. They were imputed a corporal condition and/or a complexio linked to the preponderance of the melancholic and phlegmatic ‘humor’ which expressed a kind of specific morality and behavior according to medical discourse of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This chapter analyzes how these medical assessments were transferred to the American Indians with a high degree of generalizing essentialism in order to naturalize a condition of permanent servitude. This knowledge transfer used to describe them, implied a series of strategic analogies and correspondences among the generalized significations and representations of complex melancholy on the individuals in the Old World and the observed practices and behaviors of the Natives of the New World.