QUILLET TELLS PROSPECTIVE MOTHERS HOW THEY MAY GIVE BIRTH TO A SON

Abstract

Claude Quillet (1602-1680), a French abbot and physician-a protégé of Cardinal Mazarin-published a didactic poem in 1655 of about 2,000 Latin hexameters titled Callipaedia, or The Art of Getting Beautiful Children. Surprisingly enough, medical poems as a method of instruction–even those written in Latin hexameters–were once well received and actually read. Quillet's was so popular that none less than the English Poet Laureate, Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), translated the Latin hexameters into English rhyming heroics in 1712. This translation in English verse passed through at least four other editions (1715, 1733, 1761, 1771).¹

Quillet's erroneous advice to mothers anxious for a son was held to be irrefragable by many of the greatest physicians of ancient Greece and Rome. Even Avicenna (980-1037), the greatest of the early Arabian physicians, in his Canon, which many consider the most famous medical text ever written, writes emphatically that males are formed in the right chamber of the uterus and females in the left chamber.²

Here is Quillet's advice to prospective mothers:

. . . The morning for a male is best; The seed maturing in the Time of Rest, a firm and well-cemented Basis lays, From whence the lusty nervous Boy to raise.

Nor must thou only this thy Care believe, That the close womb the fruitful Seed receive:

But when the Stream of either Parent mix'd, Are in their proper Receptacle fix'd; Let the wife, mindful of the kind Design, Turn to the Right, and there at Ease recline: For in that Cell, the Seeds of Life begun, Will surest work the Fluid to a Son Who knows not that the Right the Left excels.