Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (63 page)

The term “birth control” was coined in 1914 by Irish-American nurse Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children herself, who is regarded as the “mother of planned parenthood.” But the concept is ancient, practiced in early
societies, and it arose out of an astonishing biological change that occurred in the female reproductive cycle some six million years ago.

The change involved estrus, or heat. At that time, females, in the lineage that would become
Homo sapiens
, began to switch from being sexually receptive to males only during limited periods of estrus to continuous arousal and receptivity. Thus, from conceiving young only during a brief season (nature’s own birth control), the female evolved to bearing young year round.

Anthropologists theorize this development went hand in hand with the emerging trait of walking erect. To achieve balance for upright posture, the pelvic canal narrowed; this meant difficult and often fatal pregnancies. Natural selection began to favor females with a proclivity for giving premature birth—that is, for having babies small enough to negotiate the narrowed canal. These premature babies required longer postnatal care and consequently kept their mothers busier. Thus, the female became increasingly dependent on the male for food and protection. And she guaranteed herself and her offspring these necessities by offering the male in return sexual favors for longer and longer periods of time. Those females with only limited periods of estrus gradually died off. Soon entire generations carried the gene for continuous sexual arousal and receptivity. And with this development came the notion of controlling unwanted conception.

For tens of thousands of years, the only contraceptive method was coitus interruptus, in which the man withdraws to ejaculate outside the woman’s body: the biblical sin of Onan. With the emergence of writing about 5,500 years ago, a record of birth control methods—from the bizarre to the practical—entered history.

Every culture sought its own foolproof method to prevent conception. In ancient China, women were advised to swallow quicksilver (mercury) heated in oil. It may well have worked, since mercury is highly toxic and probably poisoned the fetus—and to a lesser extent, the mother.

A less harmful procedure was practiced by Egyptian women. Before intercourse, a woman was advised to insert a mixture of crocodile dung and honey into her vagina. While the viscous honey might have served as a temporary obstacle to impede sperm from colliding with an egg, it is more likely that the salient ingredient was dung: its sharp acidity could alter the pH environment necessary for conception to occur, killing the sperm. In effect, it was history’s first
spermicide
.

Egyptian birth control methods are the oldest on record. The Petri Papyrus, written about 1850
B.C
., and the Eber Papyrus, composed three hundred years later, describe numerous methods to avert pregnancy. For the man, in addition to coitus interruptus there was coitus obstructus, which is full intercourse, with the ejaculate forced into the bladder through the depression of the base of the urethra. (The papryi also contain an early mention of how women handled menstruation: Egyptian women used a homemade tampon-shaped device composed of shredded linen and crushed
acacia branch powder, later known as gum arabic, an emulsion stabilizer used in paints, candy, and medicine.)

Contraceptive methods assumed additional importance in the free-spirited Rome of the second and third centuries
A.D
. Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek gynecologist practicing in Rome, clearly understood the difference between contraceptives, which prevent conception from occurring, and abortifacients, which eject the egg after it’s fertilized. And he taught (correctly, though dangerously) that permanent female sterility could be achieved through repeated abortions. He also advised (incorrectly) that immediately following intercourse, women cough, jump, and sneeze to expel sperm; and he hypothesized infertile or “safe” days in the menstrual cycle.

Spermicides were a popular birth control method in the Near and Middle East. In ancient Persia, women soaked natural sea sponges in a variety of liquids believed to kill sperm—alcohol, iodine, quinine, and carbolic acid—and inserted them into the vagina before intercourse. Syrian sponges, from local waters, were highly prized for their absorptivity, and perfumed vinegar water, highly acidic, was a preferred spermicide.

In the ancient world, physical, as opposed to chemical, means of birth control were also available:

Cervical Cap
. From about the sixth century
B.C
., physicians, invariably males, conceived of countless cap-like devices for the female to insert over the opening of the cervix. Greek doctors advised women to scoop out the seeds of a pomegranate half to obtain a sperm-blocking cap. Centuries later, Casanova—the Italian gambler, celebrated lover, and director of the French state lotteries, who told all in his twelve-volume memoirs—presented his mistresses with partially squeezed lemon halves. The lemon shell acted as a physical barrier, and its juice as an acidic spermicide.

A highly effective cervical cap appeared in Germany in 1870. Designed by the anatomist and physician Wilhelm Mensinga, the cap was a hollow rubber hemisphere with a watch spring around the head to secure it in place. Known as the “occlusive pessary,” or popularly as the “Dutch cap,” it was supposed to be 98 percent effective—as good as today’s diaphragms.

IUD
. The scant documentation of the origin of intrauterine devices is attributable to their mysterious function in preventing conception. It is known that during the Middle Ages, Arabs used IUDs to thwart conception in camels during extended desert journeys. Using a hollow tube, an Arab herder slid a small stone into a camel’s uterus. Astonishingly, not until the late 1970s did doctors begin to understand how an IUD works. The foreign object, metal or plastic today, is treated as an invader in the uterus and attacked by the body’s white blood cells. Part of the white cells’ arsenal of weapons is the antiviral compound interferon. It’s believed that interferon kills sperm, preventing conception.

The Arab practice with camels led to a wide variety of foreign objects
being inserted into animal and human uteruses: beads of glass and ebony, metals, buttons, horsehair, and spools of silver threads, to mention a few. However, the first truly effective metal-coil IUD was the “silver loop,” designed in 1928 by the German physician Ernst Frafenberg. Measuring about three fifths of an inch in diameter, the loop had adequate elasticity, though as with many later IUDs, some women developed pelvic inflammation.

Throughout history, there were physicians in all cultures who advised women to douche immediately after intercourse, believing this alone was an effective contraceptive measure. But modern research has shown that within ten seconds after the male ejaculates, some sperm may already have swum from the vaginal canal into the cervix, where douching is ineffective.

From crocodile dung to douching, all ancient contraceptive methods were largely hit or miss, with the onus of preventing conception falling upon the female. Then, in the sixteenth century, an effective means of male contraception arose: the condom.

Condom: 16th and 17th Centuries, Italy and England

Prior to the sixteenth century, did no physician think of simply placing a sheath over the penis during intercourse?

It must be stated that sheaths in earlier times were thick. They interfered with a man’s pleasure. And most doctors were men. Thus, sheaths were seldom recommended or used. That may be overstating the case, but only slightly. Penile sheaths did exist. There is evidence that the Romans, and possibly the Egyptians, used oiled animal bladders and lengths of intestine as sheaths. However, their purpose was not primarily to prevent the woman from becoming pregnant but to protect the man against catching venereal disease. When it came to birth control, men preferred to let women take the lead.

Italian anatomist Gabriel Fallopius, the sixteenth-century physician who first described the two slender tubes that carry ova from the ovaries to the uterus, is generally regarded as the “father of the condom” —an anachronistic title since Dr. Condom would not make his contribution to the device for another hundred years.

In the mid-1500s, Fallopius, a professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, designed a medicated linen sheath that fit over the glans, or tip of the penis, and was secured by the foreskin. It represents the first clearly documented prophylactic for the male member. Soon sheaths appeared for circumcised men. They were a standard eight inches long and tied securely at the base with a pink ribbon, presumably to appeal to the female. Fallopius’s invention was tested on over one thousand men, “with complete success,” as the doctor himself reported. The euphemism of the day labeled them “overcoats.”

Fallopius initially conceived of the sheath not as a contraceptive device
but as a means of combating venereal disease, which then was on an epidemic rise. It is from this sixteenth-century European outbreak that sailors to the New World are believed to have introduced the
Treponema pallidum
bacterium of syphilis to native Indians.

Penile sheaths in the sixteenth century were dullingly thick, made from animal gut and fish membranes in addition to linen. Since they interfered with the pleasure of intercourse and only occasionally prevented disease—being improperly used, and reused unwashed—they were unpopular with men and regarded with derision. A French marquis sarcastically summed up the situation when he called a cattle-intestine sheath he’d tried “armor against love, gossamer against infection.”

How did Fallopius’s overcoats get to be named condoms?

Legend has it that the word derives from the earl of Condom, the knighted personal physician to England’s King Charles II in the mid-1600s. Charles’s pleasure-loving nature was notorious. He had countless mistresses, including the most renowned actress of the period, Nell Gwyn, and though he sired no legitimate heirs, he produced innumerable bastards throughout the realm.

Dr. Condom was requested to produce, not a foolproof method of contraception, but a means of protecting the king from syphilis. His solution was a sheath of stretched and oiled intestine of sheep. (It is not known if he was aware of Fallopius’s invention of a hundred years earlier. It is part of condom lore that throughout the doctor’s life, he discouraged the use of his name to describe the invention.) Condom’s sheath caught the attention of noblemen at court, who adopted the prophylactics, also against venereal disease.

The fact that sexually transmitted disease was feared far more than siring illegitimate children can be seen in several dictionary definitions of condoms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
, for instance, published in London in 1785, defines a condom as “the dried gut of a sheep, worn by men in the act of coition, to prevent venereal infection.” The entry runs for several additional sentences, with no mention of contraception.

Only in this century, when penicillin laid to rest men’s dread of syphilis, did the condom come to be viewed as protection primarily against pregnancy.

A condom made of vulcanized rubber appeared in the 1870s and from the start acquired the popular name
rubber
. It was not yet film thin, sterile, and disposable. A man was instructed to wash his rubber before and after intercourse, and he reused one until it cracked or tore. Effective and relatively convenient, it was still disliked for its dulling of sensation during intercourse. Thinner modern latex rubber would not be introduced until the 1930s.

Rubbers were denounced by religious groups. In New York in the 1880s, the postal service confiscated more than sixty-five thousand warehouse
condoms about to sold through the mail, labeling them “articles for immoral purposes,” and police arrested and fined more than seven hundred people who manufactured and promoted the goods.

Vasectomy; Sperm and Egg: 1600s, England and Netherlands

In the century when Dr. Condom supposedly introduced sheaths to England, fellow British physicians performed the first vasectomy. Although the means of cutting and cauterizing the male tubes was crude, the surgery was supposed to be effective—though never reversible, as a vasectomy usually is today.

It was also in the seventeenth century that a major human reproductive principle was confirmed—the union of sperm and egg.

Early physicians did not realize that conception required a sperm to collide with a female’s egg. For centuries, no one even suspected that an egg existed. Men, and only men, were responsible for the continuation of the species. Physicians assumed that the male ejaculate contained
homunculi
, or “tiny people,” who grew into human beings after being deposited in a woman’s uterus. Contraceptive methods were a means of halting the march of homunculi to the nurturing uterus. In the sixteenth century, Gabriel Fallopius described the tubes connecting the ovaries to the uterus, and in 1677 a Dutch haberdasher constructed the first quality microscope and identified sperm cells, half the reproductive story.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632 in Delft, the Netherlands. He plied the haberdashery trade and in his spare time experimented with grinding glass to make lenses. In producing microscopes of high resolution and clarity, Leeuwenhoek almost single-handedly established the field of microbiology.

Continually sliding new specimens under his superior lenses, Leeuwenhoek made numerous important discoveries. He observed that aphids reproduced by parthenogenesis or “virgin birth,” in which female eggs hatch without male fertilization. Using his own blood, he gave the first accurate description of red blood cells; and using his own saliva, he recorded the myriad bacteria that inhabit the human mouth. Using his own ejaculate (which drew public cries of immorality), he discovered sperm. Clearly, semen was not composed of homunculi; sperm had to unite with an egg, and women did make half the contribution to the production of offspring, a role that in the past had often been denied them.