Ancient Greek Text Shows Musical View Of Pregnancy According To Translation By University Of Cincinnati...( luck (even if the baby wasborn alive)...)

Belief in the bad luck of an eight-month baby was a way that families could explain the death of an infant. "It was a way of saying it's nobody's fault. It must have been an eight-month baby and that is why it died," Parker said.

Like nearly all of the other ancient medical writers now known, Damastes had no concept of "prematurity." All fetuses, whether they were born at seven, eight, nine or 10 months, were thought to go through certain stages. The stages were just shorter or longer for pregnancies of different length. In Damastes case, the stages were foam, blood, flesh, form, motion and birth.

Unlike many of the other ancient medical writers, Damastes makes no distinction between the sexes and how fast they developed inside their mothers. He wrote that male and female children follow the same developmental schedule. Aristotle, for example, wrote that males, with their "greater heat," are perfected faster than the female and the male fetus achieved motion and formation of the body around 40 days, while females quickened and achieved full formation in 90.

The manuscript of the Damastes text is housed at the Laurenziana Library in Florence, Italy. Parker studied it and obtained a microfiche copy for further study during a Rome Prize fellowship he won from the American Academy in Rome in 1996.

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Contact: Marianne Cianciolo
marianne.cianciolo@uc.edu
513-556-1826
University of Cincinnati
29-Dec-1997