Mother's Spots and Monstrosities: Congenital Disabilities and Racial Identity in American Medicine, Law and Folklore

This paper examines maternal impression, the idea that pregnant women who witnessed a shocking sight or experienced strong emotions could “mark” the fetus she carried. This popular antebellum belief helped explain birth marks and “defects” from naevi materni (“mother’s spots”) to physical disabilities (“monstrosities”). Against the backdrop of racial slavery, physicians employed this theory along racial lines to explain congenital disabilities. They largely associated it with white women as a reflection of their “advanced” nervous systems, while arguing that black women’s supposed lasciviousness “explained” their children’s congenital conditions. Abolitionist Hosea Easton mobilized this theory to argue that enslaved mothers passed on the trauma of slavery to children in utero thus leading to the “degraded” condition of black life in America that slaveholders used to justify the institution. In other cases, mother’s spots and congenital disabilities were used to prove racial classifications and familial ties. German immigrant Salomé Müller alleged that she was white and falsely enslaved, winning a legal case when her childhood nurse testified about hidden birthmarks that convinced the court of her racial identity. Enslaved people likewise relied on physical traits as markers of identity, evident in the widespread belief that disabled children were “marked after” favorite ancestors or that enslaved mothers’ knowledge of children’s physical anomalies would protect mothers and sons separated under slavery from accidentally becoming incestuous romantic partners years later in freedom.