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Order of Contents
Article 1
Quotes 2
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Article
2000’s
Waters, Emma – ‘A Christian’s Practical Guide to Reproductive Technology’ (2024) 21 paragraphs at The Gospel Coalition: Canadian Edition
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Quotes
1600’s
Gisbert Voet
Intro
The claims below (which Voet is skeptical of) that a human could be born through an animal’s uterus are false; this is not possible with current scientific knowledge, and Paracelsus’s account below doesn’t speak of a fertilized human egg, but only male sperm generating such.
The issues, such as (1) genetic and species-specific development, (2) placental incompatibility, (3) immune system rejection, and (4) size and growth incompatibilities in the uterus, are so far unovercomable.
The quotes below are valuable for seeing that questions and interest about such issues were live in the 1600’s and before.
With regard to Paracelsus’s claim and his context, see especially Wikipedia, “Homunculus”. Liceti below appears to be making an inference from his principles that such could be done, likely trying to explain the claims of others to the same effect.
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Select Theological Disputations, vol. 1, pt. 2 tr. by AI by Onku (Utrecht: Johannes a Waesberg, 1648), ‘On Creation’, pt. 10 Latin
pp. 296-97
“Paracelsus [d. 1541] teaches that men can be produced by the chemical art in his [Opus] Paramirum [A Work Beyond-Wonder, 1531], where he makes three parts of man: elemental, celestial and divine. He denies that the first two come into heaven. There he writes thus:
‘It was doubted by the philosophers whether it could happen that a man be born outside the womb of a woman; to which I respond that it is not repugnant to chemical art and nature, but is very easy. For sperm enclosed in a cucurbit [a flask] or sealed in the womb [venter equinus] of a [living] horse, by the highest putrefaction putrefies for fifty days, until it moves, which is easy to discern.
After that time, it will appear somehow similar to a fetus, yet without a body, transparent. If you then daily prudently nourish or feed this with human blood, and keep and cherish it in the equal heat of the horse’s belly, after nine months it will appear adorned with all members like an infant born from a woman, yet smaller in quantity.
This thing we call a homunculus, which must afterwards be educated with careful solicitude and diligence like a true boy or infant, until it grows up.’
He adds there that those who are thus born understand all arcana and hidden things which it is otherwise impossible for men to know, because they have acquired life, body, flesh and bones by art; therefore the arts and sciences are innate to them, nor do they need to learn from elsewhere.”
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pp. 298-99
“III. Problem: Whether [a man may be generated] from a man and a brute?
I would scarcely dare to concede it. Some examples are adduced by the historians Castanheda the Portuguese, Saxo Grammaticus, Olaus Magnus, João de Barros, Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, bk. 5 chs. 6-7, and that well-known one in Belgium in Delrio, bk. 2, question 14. But to confess the truth, I would prefer not to be so liberal in believing…
…Fortunio Liceti [d. 1657] in book 2 of his work On Monsters [1616], chs. 68-73…
His second reason is: That the uterus, for example of a [living] cow, can be a suitable place in which a human fetus can be conserved, cherished, and all the functions necessary for its formation and perfection can be performed no less than in a human uterus, as he says is clear from what he wrote in his book, On the Perfect Constitution of Man in the Uterus [1616], chs. 23-24.”
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Related Pages
On the Timing of Ensoulment in the Womb, including with respect to Christ’s Incarnation & Gestation