An international team of scholars trace the tradition of the enquiry into the nature of the embryo over the last 2000 years. The book explores the attitudes of a variety of cultures - Greek, Latin, Jewish, Arabian, Islamic and Christian - and considers how the subject is regarded in terms of medical practice, penitential discipline, canon law, common law and human feeling. It argues that the terms in which the issue were discussed were set down by the Greeks and transmitted through Arabic authors to medieval Europe. Finally, it examines how the beliefs of various cultures and religions relate to the research being carried out in laboratories in the 1990s.