Strange Appetites: Pica in Early Modern Pregnancy
The men and medics of the 17th century were consumed with anxiety over women’s pregnancy cravings.
In 1650 the physician Thomas Willis was called to the Falkam household in Oxfordshire on an urgent call. Mrs Falkam, a ‘woman of good family, aged about 20’, was six months pregnant when she ‘fell into an exquisite tertian fever’. The fever, Willis quickly ascertained, was caused by Mrs Falkam’s ‘gulping down uncooked liquid [perhaps vinegar] on account of an insistent pica’. Willis prescribed a vomit and ordered his patient to keep to a ‘strict diet’, forgoing her strange cravings.
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