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).

This chapter argues against the narrative that posits a pre-twentieth century past, where the mother and fetus were one, in contrast with the present, where the fetus is visible and autonomous. I complicate this narrative by showing that the maternal–fetal relationship was redrawn and reinterpreted multiple times in the twentieth century. The ‘fetal parasite’ era was informed by the hereditarianism of the early 1900s. The notion of a developing organism sensitive to external influences was replaced by a remarkably sheltered fetus. In contrast, concerns around the physical and psychological trauma following the Second World War supported the notion of ‘critical’ periods, responsive to external influences mediated by the mother. Yet soon thereafter, the language and imagery of an autonomous, self-sufficient fetus became prevalent amidst political battles over abortion. The notion of the autonomous fetus is linked to evolutionary biology’s 1970s concepts of the ‘selfish gene’ – with the ‘selfish’ fetus pitted against the mother in the struggle over scarce resources. By the 1990s, the rise of DOHaD and epigenetics signalled a return of the maternally mediated environment to the science of human development. While some interpreted this as a return to the pre-modern model, there is a significant difference. Here maternal experiences and surroundings have to be rendered accessible to an experimental, molecular approach and to show evidence of a quantifiable change in observed parameters.