I
Fever Versus Shock Pregnancy
Questions are raised concerning pregnancy and the possible
effects of outer events during pregnancy.
Dr. Steiner: Gentlemen, these are extremely important
aspects of life. Generally, no significant influence can be
exerted on the child during pregnancy except indirectly by way
of the mother, since the child is connected with the mother, as
I have said here already, by numerous delicate blood vessels.
The unborn child receives everything it requires, including its
nourishment, from its mother. Later, it acquires a completely
different breathing process.
We
can best consider the matters that you have brought up if we
deal further with the general basis of human states of illness
and health. In pregnancy, it is even more difficult than in the
case of common hunger and thirst to say where the inclination
toward illness begins and where it ends. Other things also
enter into pregnancy that prove beyond doubt that the mother's
condition of soul has an extraordinary influence on the
developing child. You only have to observe what happens, for
example, if the mother, especially in the early months of
pregnancy, is badly frightened. As a rule, the child will be
affected for its whole life. Naturally, you cannot say that a
physical change occurs in the child but only that the mother
suffers a fright. How can a mother's fright affect the
child?
Modern science basically gives the most inadequate answers
here, because it really knows nothing, or claims to know
nothing, of what influences the human soul and spirit. We can
best approach these difficult questions — and they are
indeed complicated — if we focus on two phenomena of life
that man experiences primarily in illness, that is, fever and
shock. These are two opposite conditions that man undergoes,
fever and shock.
What is fever? You know that man's normal body temperature is
98.6°. If it rises any higher, we say that he has a fever.
The fever is visible outwardly through a person becoming
hotter. What is shock? Shock is actually the opposite
condition. Shock occurs when a person is incapable of
developing sufficient warmth within. If you take an overdose of
a poison such as henbane (Hyoscyamwus niger), for
example, which is also used as a remedy, you risk the danger of
going into shock. The reaction is that, through the shock, all
the membranes in the abdomen of the mother, where the child
must also be developing — therefore, the membranes of the
intestines but also those of the organ in which the child rests
during pregnancy, the so-called uterus, the womb, in other
words, all the membranes through which a substance is
introduced into the body — become slack. It is as if a
sack were stretched too far, becoming worn out and unable to
hold anything any longer. With the introduction of henbane,
undigested food backs up, and the proper functioning of the
abdomen, which I described recently, is disrupted. A large
amount of food accumulates in a man's abdomen that he cannot
assimilate.
In
order to understand what is at work here, we must take a closer
look at the human organism. What actually happens when the
abdomen does not work properly? Although it is the abdomen that
isn't working properly, you will find that something is
actually wrong with the front portion of the brain. A very
interesting relationship!
Diagram 1.
Consider the human being — the abdomen, the chest, the
diaphragm, which is about here (Rudolf Steiner sketched on the
blackboard). There we have abdomen, chest, and head. If
something is out of order in the abdomen, then something is not
functioning properly also in the front part of the brain. The
two therefore belong together. In the human being they belong
inwardly together, the forebrain and abdomen. We can also say
that the heart with its arteries, as I have described them to
you, is connected with the midbrain. Finally, the chest with
the lungs and the breathing process is related to the back
portion of the brain.
Every time something is amiss with the breathing, something is
also wrong in the back part of the brain. Whenever a person has
difficulty breathing and doesn't receive enough oxygen, one can
observe that something is wrong with the back of the brain.
When a person suffers from disorders of the heart, especially
if the rhythm of the heart's activity is disrupted so that the
pulse is irregular, then something is wrong in the midbrain. In
a disorder of the abdomen, one always finds some irregularity
in the forebrain. Everything is remarkably related in the human
being.
You
see, people often don't want to believe these things, because
in the formation of the forehead they see the noblest aspect of
the human being and the less noble in the abdomen. And if one
speaks the truth about these things, such people find it
unworthy of man. You will have realized from my lectures,
however, that the digestive system is in turn related to the
limb system in such a way that it represents a most significant
aspect of the human being.
Once I knew a man who had quite an unusual forehead. A Greek
forehead is different (sketching). In Greek statues we find
foreheads that slope backward. This man actually had a
pronounced bulge, and his forebrain was actually pushed out. I
am convinced that this man, whose brain was pushed forward so
much, possessed a particularly well-formed abdomen and never
suffered from diarrhea or constipation, for example; he never
suffered from stomach aches and the like. The man in question
was, in fact, a person of unusual sensitivity, but this
sensitivity depended on his always feeling inwardly
comfortable. This indicates that his powerful, protruding
forehead never permitted disorders of the abdomen. You can see
from this that a man's forehead is related in a remarkable way
to his abdomen.
Diagram 2.
If
I give someone too large a dose of henbane, he goes into shock.
What causes this shock? Something goes wrong with the
forebrain, because everything possible collects in his abdomen.
Oddly, however, when a person complains of a stomach ache,
caused perhaps by mild constipation, I can give him henbane in
highly diluted form, and he will become healthy. He gets a
slight fever and becomes well.
Here you see a strange fact. If I give too much henbane to a
perfectly healthy person, he goes into shock. He will suffer
severe abdominal distress, his head will feel cold, his abdomen
will swell, the intestines will slacken, and the abdominal
functions will cease. What do you see from this? You see that I
have introduced too much henbane into the stomach. The stomach
should react with vastly increased digestive activity, because
henbane is extremely difficult to digest. Being poisonous
simply means that a substance is difficult to digest. The
stomach therefore must become furiously active. The brain is
not strong enough, the front part of the brain. These things
thus are related in the human body. The brain is not strong
enough to stimulate the stomach sufficiently; the brain becomes
cold and the person goes into shock.
What happens now if I give a person a minute, diluted dose of
henbane? In this case, the stomach has less to do, and the
brain is strong enough to regulate this minor task. Through
introducing a minute amount of henbane, which the brain can
manage, I have stimulated the brain into working harder than
before. If the brain can overcome it, it is like asking a
person to do a job that he can manage; then, he does it well.
If I ask him to do a job in one day that actually requires ten,
he would be ruined. This is the case with the brain. It
contains, as it were, the workman in charge of the abdomen. If
I ask too little of the brain, the workman remains lazy; if he
is stimulated through his activity, he does well; if I ask too
much of the abdomen, however, he refuses to participate and the
person goes into shock.
What is the cause of fever? Fever is actually the result of an
over-activity of the brain, which penetrates the entire human
being. Assume that a person suffers from a disorder in some
organ, say the liver or the kidneys, or especially the lungs,
in the way I discussed with you recently. The brain begins to
rebel against it. If the lungs no longer function correctly,
the back portion of the brain rebels and stimulates the front
part into rebelling against this lung disease, and hence fever
occurs.
This shows that man becomes warmer from his head downward and
colder from below upward. This is very interesting. The human
being actually is warmed downward from above. With fever we are
concerned with our head. If there is an inflammation in the big
toe, we produce the ensuing fever with the head. It is
interesting that what lies farthest down is regulated by the
foremost parts of the brain. Just as in the case of the dog,
whose tail is regulated by his nose, so it is with the human
being. If he struggles with a fever in his big toe, the
activity that begets this fever lies entirely in the front of
his brain. It is no slight to his dignity that, if man has an
infection in his big toe, the fever originates entirely from
the front, from a point above his nose. The human being thus
always becomes warmer from above and colder from below.
This is related to why shock can be induced if excessively
large doses of certain substances are administered to the human
being but why a healing rise in temperature can be produced if
we do not overtax the brain but stimulate its activity only
with small doses. The activity of the brain, however, is
stimulated all day not only by substances that we introduce
into the brain; what we see and hear also stimulate it
constantly. Also, when you eat, you not only fill your
stomachs, but you taste your food as well. Taste is stimulated,
as is the sense of smell, all of which stimulates the
brain.
Consider a woman who is pregnant. The child is in the first
period of the pregnancy, which entails a tremendous increase in
the mother's abdominal activity. Except during pregnancy, such
activity in the abdomen is never necessary; in men, it doesn't
occur at all. The abdominal activity thus is increased in an
unprecedented way. When abdominal activity is increased, the
sensory nerves above all are stimulated, because the abdomen
and the forebrain belong together.
What does it mean when a person is hungry? I have explained to
you that here a certain activity that really should be
continuous cannot be performed. When hungry, a person craves
food, which means that at the same time he longs for the
stimulation of his taste buds. He can alleviate this by
eating.
When a woman is pregnant, however, and must provide in her
abdomen something for the growing child, much is stimulated
also in the brain, particularly in the sensory nerves, the
nerves of taste and smell. Eating does not satisfy these nerves
of taste and smell, because the food doesn't go directly to the
child but to the stomach. An excess of activity is required.
The abdomen must work overtime in a certain way, and so the
need arises in the head for beyond-normal smells and tastes.
The best care for the unborn child naturally requires an
understanding of these matters.
Pregnant women thus often are not at all satisfied when they
obtain what they momentarily crave; as soon as they have it,
they crave another taste. Being also extremely moody, their
taste is subject to abrupt change. One can appease them,
however, by being kind to them and paying heed to what, in
one's own opinion, is only a figment of their imagination. In
the early months of pregnancy, women live in fantasies of
tastes and smells. If you simply say to a pregnant woman, it is
just your imagination, it is a real emotional slap to her. What
is developing in her quite naturally due to the connection
between the brain or head and the abdomen is repulsed. But if
one cheers her up by being attentive, neither denying her
wishes nor taking them literally, it is much easier to satisfy
her. If, for example, one buys her something with vanilla
flavor the second she craves it, by the time it is brought to
her it may no longer be the right thing; she might say,
“Yes, but now I want sauerkraut!” It is well that
it should be so! You must realize that if something so
extraordinary is to take place in her abdomen it is because the
child's development must demand it, and the pregnant woman must
therefore receive special consideration.
Indeed, this shows us a lot more. It shows us that a powerful
influence is exerted on the child by the environment of soul
and spirit in which the mother lives. With some insight, the
following can be understood. There are children who are born
with “water on the brain,” that is, with
hydrocephalus. In most cases this can be traced back to the
fact that the mother, who perhaps rightly sought stimulation in
life, was bored stiff during the first months of pregnancy,
particularly the first few weeks. Perhaps her husband
frequently went out alone to the local pub and she, being left
at home, was extremely bored. The result was that she lacked
the energy required to influence the brain cells. Boredom makes
her head empty; the empty head, in turn, imparts emptiness to
the abdomen. It does not develop sufficient strength to hold
the forces of the child's head together properly. The head
swells up, becoming hydrocephalous. Other children are born
with abnormally small heads, particularly the upper portion of
the head, that is, with acrocephaly. Most of these cases are
connected with the fact that during the first weeks of
pregnancy the mother engaged in too much diversion and amused
herself excessively. If such matters are observed properly, a
relationship can always be noted between the child's
development and the mother's mood of soul during the early
weeks of pregnancy.
Naturally, much is accomplished with medicine, but regarding
these questions we have as yet no real medicine today but only
a kind of quackery, because the many relationships are not
correctly discerned by a merely materialistic science. These
relationships require individual observation in most instances,
and during the embryonic life of the human being, and therefore
during pregnancy, they can be observed particularly well.
Consider the significantly increased abdominal activity during
pregnancy; the abdomen must be terribly active. This, in turn,
calls for the strongest possible activity of the forebrain. It
is not surprising, therefore, that some mothers actually become
a little crazy during the first stage of pregnancy. They become
a little crazy, because the abdomen and the forebrain, which
actually thinks, are closely related. One arrives at very
remarkable and interesting results if one looks for the
relationships between the abdomen and what humanity
accomplishes spiritually. It is curious and funny that
spiritual science must call attention to these matters, whereas
materialistic science completely fails in this area.
It
would be extraordinarily interesting, for example, to consider
the following. You see, there were a great many philosophers in
England — Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, Hume. These philosophers,
even including John Stuart Mill, led essentially to the great
rise of materialism. These philosophers all had such heavy
thoughts that they could not penetrate the spiritual with their
thoughts. They clung to matter with their thoughts. It would be
extraordinarily interesting to examine the digestions of all
these philosophers, these many philosophers. I am convinced
they all suffered from constipation! Starting with Hobbes in
the seventeenth century, and proceeding all the way into the
nineteenth, this whole philosophy that brought us materialism
was actually caused by the constipation of individual
philosophers! This materialism could have been prevented
— what I say now is not in earnest, I only wish to make a
joke! — if one had given Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, and the
others regular laxatives in their youth. Then all this
materialism most likely would not have arisen.
It
is indeed odd, you see, that something that people frequently
call materialistic must be pointed out by spiritual science.
But the reason for this is that when the human being is really
observed, the spirit is revealed where others see only matter.
Anthroposophy does not assume that the abdomen is only a
chemical factory. I once told you that the liver is a wondrous
organ, that the kidney with its functions is also a marvelous
organ. Only by comprehending these organs will one find the
spirit everywhere. If you stop finding the spirit in some area,
if you think that digestion is a process that is too
materialistic to be studied in a spiritual way, you then become
a materialist. Indeed, materialism came into being through
spiritual arrogance. I have told you this before, though it
sounds remarkable: when the ancient Jews of the Old Testament
had bad thoughts during the night, they did not blame the bad,
unhealthy thoughts on their heads but on their kidneys. When
they said, “This night God has affected my
kidneys,” they were more correct than today's medicine.
The ancient Jews also said that God reveals Himself to man not
through man's head but directly through the activity of his
kidneys and generally through his abdominal activity.
Considering this viewpoint, it is most interesting, though I
don't know if you gentlemen have seen it, to watch an Orthodox
Jew pray. When a devout Orthodox Jew prays, he does not take
his phylactery out of a pocket that he wears over his heart or
that hangs over his head. He wears his phylactery over his
abdomen and prays with it in this position. People today
naturally no longer know what the relationship is here, but
those who long ago gave the ancient Jews their commandments
were aware of the relationship. In western regions of Europe,
people don't have much opportunity anymore to see this, but in
eastern European regions it makes quite a special impression to
observe how the old Jews pray. When they prepare for prayer,
they take the phylactery out of the slit in their trousers; it
then hangs around them and they pray.
This knowledge that humanity once possessed by means of various
dreamlike, ancient clairvoyant forces has been lost, and
humanity today is not advanced enough to rediscover the spirit
in all matter. You can comprehend nothing if you simply take
your ordinary thoughts into a laboratory and mechanically
execute experiments, and so on. You are not thinking at all
while doing this. You must experiment in such a way that
something of the spirit emerges everywhere; for that to happen,
your experiments must be arranged accordingly. And so one can
say that it is funny that anthroposophy, the science of the
spirit, has to point out how the human brain, the so-called
noblest part, is connected with the lower abdomen, but it is
simply so. Only a true science leads to these facts. Similarly,
any number of things can cause a disorder of the heart, for
example. It can come through an internal irregularity, but in
most cases an irregular activity of the heart can be traced to
some disorder in the midbrain, where the feelings are
particularly based (see sketch, Diagram 1). It is interesting
to discover that just as the abdomen is related to the
forebrain, so this forebrain is related, from the viewpoint of
the soul, to the will, and the midbrain is related to feeling.
Actually, only the back part of the brain is related to
thinking. If we look into the brain, we see that the hindbrain
is related to breathing and to thinking. Breathing has, in
fact, a pronounced relationship to thinking.
Picture the following case. A person lacking the benefits of
Waldorf education, in which these things are frequently
discussed, develops in his youth in such a way that he turns
out to be a scoundrel. His feelings are confused, causing him
to be malicious. What does this mean? It means that the soul
does not work correctly in the midbrain. If the soul is not
properly nourished, the heart's rhythm becomes irregular. You
can cause an irregular rhythm of the heart and all sorts of
diseases of the heart by developing into an ill-tempered
person.
Naturally, if a woman in early pregnancy goes into a forest,
let us say, and has the misfortune of discovering a person who
has hanged himself from a tree and is already dead — if
he is still twitching, it's even worse — she sustains a
terrible shock. It becomes an image in her, and probably,
unless other measures can be taken — usually by life
itself, not by artificially induced means — she will give
birth to a child who is pale, with a pointed chin and skinny
limbs, and who is unable to move around properly. With a
pregnant woman, just one such frightening sight suffices to
affect the unborn child. In later life, when one is eighteen,
nineteen, or twenty years old, to be a scoundrel only once
won't hurt; one must become a habitual scoundrel, and that
takes longer. With a pregnant woman, however, a single incident
is enough.
The
results of such experiments can reach much further. Imagine a
young mother-to-be who is busy with her work. She hasn't been
told that army maneuvers are being held nearby. Cannons begin
to thunder, and her ears are given a frightful shock. Since
hearing is strongly connected with the hindbrain as well as
with the breathing, such a fright can cause a disorder of the
breathing system of her developing child.
You
might ask, “What is he saying? Why, he wants us to pay
attention to every little detail in life!” Yes,
gentlemen, if a healthy educational system and healthy social
conditions existed, you wouldn't have to think at all about
many of these things, since they would develop by force of
habit like other routine matters. I don't believe that there
are many men who, when they habitually beat their wives in the
middle of every month, give it too much thought. They do it out
of habit. There are such husbands. Why do they beat their
wives? Because they have run out of money, they cannot go down
to the local pub, so they amuse themselves at home by abusing
their wives. These are habits that are formed. Well, gentlemen,
if we had a sound educational system for everybody, we would
acquire different habits. Were it known, for example, that army
maneuvers would be held one morning and that there would be
explosions, it should as a matter of course be called to the
attention of any pregnant woman in the area. Something like
this can become a habit. Sound education and socially
acceptable conditions can give rise to a number of habits that
need not be thought about any longer but simply carried out.
This is something toward which we must work. Essentially,
however, this can be accomplished only through proper
education.
This is why the science of the spirit in particular will be in
a position to explain the material world correctly. Materialism
only looks at the material realm but is ignorant of all that
lives in the material. It observes fever but does not know that
fever is called forth by tremendously expanded brain activity.
Materialism is always greatly astonished by shock but does not
rightly recognize that shock comes from a drop of body
temperature, because the proper “internal
combustion” [Verbrennung] can no longer continue.
Thus we can say that the way the head of a pregnant woman is
stimulated is strongly connected with the child's
development.
People pay no heed to what is contained in spiritual culture. A
sound education will also gradually permeate everything we read
and are told. Someday, for example, when people pay attention
to what anthroposophy says, novels will perhaps be published
for pregnant women. When pregnant women read them, they will
receive impressions of ideal human beings. As a result,
beautiful babies will be born who will grow to be strong,
fine-looking human beings. What a woman does with her head
during pregnancy becomes the source of the activity taking
place in her abdomen. She shapes and forms the child with what
she imagines, feels, and wills.
Here, spiritual science becomes tangible to the point where one
can no longer say that the spirit has no influence on the human
being. For the rest of his life, unless education sets it right
later on, a person is under the influence of what his mother
did during the first months of pregnancy. The later months are
not as particularly important, because man has already been
shaped, and definite forms have become fixed, but the first
months are of particular importance and are full of
significance. When one sees the physical origin of the human
being in the womb, something reveals itself that in every
respect points to spiritual science.
If
one thinks reasonably, one can say to oneself that the warmth
streaming down from above and the cold streaming up from below
must always meet in the right way in the abdomen. One must care
for the abdomen in the right way. This is something that must
be seen, so that what comes from above can meet what comes from
below in the right way. When we are clear that a person is so
strongly influenced by his mother's experiences of soul and
spirit that he can end up with a large or a small head, a
ruined heart or breathing system, then we see that a person is,
in fact, completely influenced by soul-spiritual
considerations.
It
can also happen that a mother-to-be, in the first or second
months of pregnancy, could run into somebody with an unusually
crooked nose, the likes of which she has never seen before.
Unless some corrective measure is taken, in most cases the
child will receive a crooked nose. You will even be able to see
that in most cases if the woman was startled by the sight of a
person whose nose was twisted to the right, the child will be
born with a nose twisted to the left. Just as a man's right
hand is connected with the left speech center in the brain,
just as everything is reversed in the human being, so the twist
of the nose is also reversed. We can conclude that if someone
has a crooked nose, he most likely has it because his mother
was frightened by someone with a crooked nose. A person has
many other features. Materialistic science, when it doesn't
know something's origin, always talks of heredity. If one has a
crooked nose — well, that's inherited; the red skin tone
of another — that's inherited, too. Things are not like
this, however. They arise from causes such as I have related.
The concept of heredity is one of the most ambiguous held by
modern science. If you look at a person and see a twisted nose
or a birthmark, this does not necessarily indicate that the
mother saw the same birthmark. She might have seen something
else that caused the child's blood to flow in the wrong
direction. These are all deviations from the normal human form,
but there is indeed a normal human form.
One
cannot say simply that deviations from the normal human form do
not come from bodily but from spiritual experiences while still
maintaining that the entire human being comes merely from the
belly of the mother, from that which is within the material
realm! If one wishes to explain deviations spiritually, one
must explain the entire human being spiritually. Naturally, the
mother no more than the father can produce a human being
spiritually. To do so would require the production of something
impossible, that is, the art of being human, which is infinite.
We are led to understand, therefore, that man already exists
prior to birth as a spiritual being, and as soul he united with
what is made available to him corporeally. Only regarding
abnormal features can the embryo be influenced spiritually. It
is much more remarkable, however, that I have a nose in the
middle of my face or that I have two eyes! If I am born with a
crooked nose, that is an abnormal feature, but recall the nose
in the middle of the face with its marvelous normal form, which
I recently explained to you, and the eye — what a
wonder-filled thing! All this does not grow out of the mother's
womb; it is something that already exists in the soul realm
before the human being arises in the womb.
Here, correctly understood, natural science points to what
human life is like in the spiritual world before conception.
Today's materialists will naturally say that this is fantasy.
Why do they say this? All the ancient people who, in primordial
human times, still possessed certain dreamlike perceptions,
which we no longer have, knew that man exists before he appears
on earth. Throughout the Middle Ages, however, it was forbidden
by decree of the Church to think of so-called pre-existence,
which means pre-earthly existence; the Church forbade it. When
a materialist agitates today, the rostrum is only the
continuation of the medieval pulpit, and though he no longer
speaks the language of those preachers, using instead the words
of an agitator, he only says what medieval sermons stated long
ago. Materialism has simply taken over the medieval preachings,
and, though they are not aware of. it, today's materialists
basically elaborate on what the Church taught. Materialism
stems basically from the Church of the Middle Ages. Then, no
soul was permitted to have existed before its earthly life. The
intention was to teach people that God creates the soul when
conception takes place. If a couple were in the mood to let
conception occur — we know that in many instances this
can be a mood of the moment — the Good Lord had to move
quickly and create a soul for them! This is what the Church
edict really implied and what one was supposed to believe.
It
is not a sensible viewpoint, however, to make God the servant
of the moods of human beings, so that he must hurriedly produce
a soul when they happen to be in a mood to let conception take
place. If you give this some thought, you discover what is
actually contained in the materialistic viewpoint, which
undermines human dignity. A real and true knowledge of the
human being leads us instead to the realization that the soul
is already there, has always lived. It descends to what is
offered it through the human seed and its fertilization.
Anthroposophy has not, therefore, arrived back at the spirit
because of some arbitrary fantasy but simply because it must,
because it takes scientific knowledge seriously, which the
others do not. People study natural science, which would lead
to the spirit, but they are too lazy to come through natural
science to the spirit on their own. That would require a little
effort on the part of their heads. Instead, they allow some old
teachers to deprive them of the spirit, and yet they still
manage to be religious! Then they are dishonest, however; it is
like keeping two sets of books. A person who is consistent in
his reckoning must ascend from nature to spirit, and matters
such as those we have discussed today, for example, will lead
us there.
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