The Works of Aristotle is a fascinatingly diverse volume, its four sections running the gamut from titillating accounts of emerging adolescent sexual desire and step-by-step guides on how to conceive a specific gender of child, to advice for difficult births, treatments and descriptions of “the several Maladies incident to the womb,” and brief answers to an enormous range of questions—from why smells are milder in winter to why men have more teeth than women.
Born of a competitive glut of pregnancy and midwifery books in the 17th Century, Aristotle’s Master-Piece outlasted its contemporaries and underwent numerous editions and printings over the next 200 or more years, first in England and then in the United States. Additional texts joined the original treatise, and the collected “works of Aristotle” containing the four tracts offered here was first published in 1752.
Particularly fascinating about the Master-Piece is its treatment of “monster births”: this volume includes depictions of a child completely covered in hair, two sets of conjoined twins, and a child with four arms and four legs. These monstrous births, and indeed all undesirable traits in children, are consistently traced back to the parents’ mistakes, either in their copulation procedure or their mental states:
“the imaginative power at the time of conception, is of such a force as to stamp a character of the thing imagined upon the child; thus a woman at the time of conception beholding the picture of a blackamoor, conceived and brought forth a child resembling an Ethiopian”;
likewise,
“the undue coition of a man and his wife when her monthly flowings are upon her; which being a thing against nature, no wonder that it should produce an unnatural issue…or, if they should not always produce monstrous births, yet are the children thus begotten, for the most part dull, heavy, sluggish, and defective in understanding, wanting the vivacity and liveliness which those children are endued with who are begotten when women are free from their courses.”
The Book of Problems roams beyond sexuality, reproduction, and the human body to address such questions as: “Why doth a man gape when he seeth another gape”; “Why do some beasts want necks as serpents and fishes”; “Why do men desire to be had in memory after death”; and “Why does Aristotle use exceeding brevity in most hard matters.”