Inaugural Medical Dissertation on the Procreation of Male Offspring

...conception, regarding which consult, among others, the Elements of Anthropology by the Excellent Teichmeyer Hermann Friedrich Teichmeyer (1685–1744) was a celebrated professor of medicine and a pioneer in forensic medicine.. Also compare the examples found in Manget Jean-Jacques Manget (1652–1742), a Swiss physician known for compiling vast "theaters" of medical knowledge. where a fertilized egg original: "ovulum", which was unable to free itself from its bonds, brought the fetus almost to maturity in that very location to the ruin of the mother. There are other instances, proven by the testimony of authors not to be ignored, where the egg was released from the ovary but not accurately caught by the [fallopian] tube. Having slipped into the abdominal cavity, it reached the mature term of delivery there; however, because an exit was denied, the outcome was fatal for both the fetus and the mother. These are early descriptions of ectopic and abdominal pregnancies, which were almost invariably fatal for both mother and child in the 18th century.

§. XXVIII.
I explained in §. 7 that generation occurs through coitus, and I showed in the preceding sections that multiplication cannot happen without it; thus, it is an act implanted by nature. Yet everyone can see how insulting Thomas Browne Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), an English polymath and author of Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician). is toward the Author of nature in his book Religio Medici when he writes: “I should be content if we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or if there were some other way of propagating things than that common and trivial one of coition: truly, nothing is more foolish, or more unworthy of a wise man, nothing more basely casts down the high-mindedness of the soul, than when I reflect with a cooling mind how remarkably foolish I have been.” original Latin: "Mihi satis placeret, si nobis etiam arborum more..." Browne is expressing a common Baroque-era discomfort with the "unworthy" physical nature of sex compared to the "divine" nature of the soul.

§. XXIX.
It was stated above that the rudiments of the fetus already pre-exist in the egg, which the Holy Scriptures also testify regarding plants in Genesis 1:11: “Let the earth bring forth green grass, and the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth.” By these last words, it seems to be implied that seeds already contain the rudiments of the plant within themselves. If this can be said of a vegetable, why not also of man, the noblest of all created things? If, therefore, the rudiments are present in the egg, they must pre-exist as a whole—and not merely as the "principal parts" as some would have it—and thus even the parts proper to each sex must be present; otherwise, the same doubt would remain regarding the formation of the rest...