de Paris, 1815, who was the first to observe – or at least, to document – the condition that has come to be known by modern physicians as Sympathetic Identity Disorder. In the case in question, Beclard examined a seventeen-year-old Marie Lambert, who appeared to be in perfect health, but whose family insisted the raven-haired brown-eyed girl had been a red-haired and blue-eyed infant, having gradually come to resemble her deceased mother to an uncanny degree over the years. Subsequent cases investigated by Worbe (Jan. Et Fev, 1816) and Ward (Internat. Med. Magaz., Phila., July 1895), among others, similarly document cases in which children – significantly, in every instance born to mothers who died in childbirth – came to so greatly resemble their mothers as they matured as to suggest something more of a physical reconfiguration than simple hereditary similarity. Some have ventured that latent genetic potentialities surfaced with puberty, while others propose a more psychosomatic cause for this change in appearance (though naturally, in some of the earlier cases there were no photographs or even portraits by which a child might imprint upon their subconscious an image of the mother they never knew).
