Culture  /  Origin Story

Hysterical Cravings

How “pickles and ice cream” became the iconic “crazy” snack for pregnant women.
Life's Ambrosia

Long before “pickles and ice cream,” pregnancy cravings were culturally significant. In the 16th through the early 18th centuries, philosopher Rebecca Kukla writes in Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Women’s Bodies, people believed that “an expectant mother’s cravings, desires, and experiences … were capable of directly inscribing themselves upon the body of the fetus.” This was the famous “theory of the maternal imagination.” Non-food experiences could also mark a baby: If you were frightened by a bear, that could make your child hairy, for example. Some people claimed, Kukla writes, that “cravings for strawberries and other fruits caused birthmarks resembling those fruits; cravings for shellfish caused particularly grotesque facial deformities.” As Kukla points out, a woman didn’t even need to indulge her cravings for her child to show them. Either way, your child would carry the mark of your deepest strawberry longings.

While post-Enlightenment physicians pooh-poohed the theory of maternal imagination, 19th-century pregnancy advice-givers spoke quite sternly about the dangers of maternal cravings. In the middle of the 19th century, Joel Shew called pregnancy cravings abnormal, claiming that the women who had them tended to be “those who suffer from indigestion, those who have constipation, and especially those who are hysterical.” “Many ignorant, nervous women seem to suppose that it is really a necessary part of their being to have these longings in pregnancy,” Shew wrote. “We need hardly say that these longings should never be gratified. No possible good can come from it; only harm, the same as at other times.”

John Eberle, in his 1833 A treatise on the diseases and physical education of children, went Shew one better, writing that following pregnancy cravings could cause “abortion” (miscarriage). “A young married woman” Eberle treated, who was four months pregnant, “was seized with excruciating and obstinate dyspeptic colic, soon after she had eaten freely of some very indigestible food.” This poor woman, who probably had some other problem completely invisible to Eberle, indulged again, about 10 days after, and Eberle writes: “The consequence was, another violent attack of colic, followed immediately by inflammation of the bowels, which in the course of the second day terminated in abortion, and on the following day in the death of the patient.”