birth-control-msg – 6/26/06
Period birth-control. Period abortifacients.
NOTE: See also the files: aphrodisiacs-msg, Sex-in-the-MA-art, p-hygiene-msg, p-sex-msg, perfumes-msg, bathing-msg, cosmetics-msg, Medvl-bathng-lnks.
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This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday.
This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org
I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with separate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter.
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Thank you,
Mark S. Harris AKA: THLord Stefan li Rous
Stefan at florilegium.org
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From: huff at silver.lcs.mit.EDU (Robert Huff)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: condoms and birth control
Date: 1 Apr 1993 19:40:24 -0500
Ave!
I remember reading in a book on Elizabethan women (no citation at hand)
that abortion was, at least in practice, condemned only if the soul had entered
the body. This was said to take place at the time of quickening ....
Diego mundoz
From: jeffs at math.bu.EDU (Jeff Suzuki)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: fetus as property
Date: 2 Apr 1993 17:24:59 -0500
Ah, found the reference: Exodus 21:22, right after the decalog.
Essentially, if two men get into a fight and hit a woman, causing a
miscarriage, the one responsible shall be fined a sum determined by
the woman's husband and the judges.
This assumes that the woman is not harmed physically. If she is
harmed physically, then the penalty is death.
Fujimoto
From: parr at acs.ucalgary.ca (Charles Parr)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: condoms and birth control, some discussion of sexuality.
Date: 7 Apr 93 18:22:51 GMT
Organization: The University of Calgary, Alberta
jeffs at math.bu.EDU (Jeff Suzuki) writes:
>Ken Mondschein writes:
>> Condoms were invented by a Dr. Condom (who soon changed his name) for
>> the court of the ribald Charles II (or was it James II?).
>
>I've heard arguments that this story is true, and other arguments that
>"Dr. Condom" never existed. Anyone out there want to sort out the
>mystery?
>
>Moreach writes:
>>I once read somewhere that there is some evidence that Renaissance women
>>used cervical caps made from half a lime rind, which lime "essence" is a
>>decent spermicide.
>
>Anything acidic (I'm assuming lime "essence" would be) acts as a
>decent spermicide; it's the principle behind douching. (It's why, in
>a pinch, coca cola will do -- eeyuk!)
>
>Anyone know about period abortifacients and want to comment on it?
>
>Incidentally, does anyone know when the idea that abortion is
>equivalent to murder got started? I'm inclined to believe it's a 20th
>century thing; certainly the Bible does not treat the unborn fetus as
>a human being but rather as a piece of property.
>
>Fujimoto
I remember reading, in a scholarly journal somewhere, that Olive
Oil makes a pretty decent spermicide, and that Greek Hetaira
used it as such...
Does anyone know of any detailed research on period birth control
techniques? I know that the church proscribed Oral and Rectal
sex *because* these techniques were used as birth control...
This might make a good subject for a TI article, or even a
Compleat Anachronist...I think I'd add a disclaimer, though,
just to avoid paternity suits;-) (well, carolus wrote that
in period they used a sock, and quoted this rhyme, and so I
tried it, and 9 months later came the twins...)
If anyone missed the warning in the header, and is offended
by this subject...Sorry...
Carolus Malvoix
Montengarde An Tir
From: donna at kwantlen.bc.CA (Donna Hrynkiw)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Bryn Mawr: Contraception and Abortion
Date: 25 Aug 1993 12:13:07 -0400
Another book of possible interest to the SCA from the
Bryn Mawr Medieval Review. The review is too long to post
here, but if you're interested drop me a note and I'll
mail it to you.
Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the
Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press 1992.
Pp. x, 245. ISBN 0-674-16875-5.
Reviewed by Paul T. Keyser -- University of Alberta
Elizabeth Braidwood
An Tir
[The following is the review that Elizabeth sent:
From bmmr-l at cc.brynmawr.edu Tue Aug 24 20:53:52 1993
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 93 23:56:59 -0400
Originator: bmmr-l at cc.brynmawr.edu
From: bmr at ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Bryn Mawr Reviews)
Subject: BMMR 93.8.8, Riddle, Contraception and Abortion
at at at at 93.8.8, Riddle, Contraception and Abortion
Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the
Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press 1992.
Pp. x, 245. ISBN 0-674-16875-5.
Reviewed by Paul T. Keyser -- University of Alberta
A seminal and unique work of great importance. Riddle has
studied Dioskorides in a recent monograph, and now focusses on
one aspect of his drug lore, already broached in a valuable
article, "Oral Contraceptives and Early-term Abortifacients
during Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages," Past and Present
no. 132 (August 1991) 3-32. A frequent problem in attempting to
understand ancient medicine is the precise nature of the
condition described: e.g. the Athenian plague. Studies of
conception and its prevention have the advantage that diagnosis
('pregnant') is proven by birth. Riddle is firmly historicist--
the procedures described are taken as such and not as metaphors
symbols or signs (vii-viii). After all, pre-modern women had as
much or more interest as moderns in effective contraceptives and
abortion.
Riddle asks was it possible for pre-modern people to
regulate fertility by other than abortion, infanticide, or
abstinence (1-16)? He rightly concludes that evidence (literary
and archaeological) shows little recourse to such methods and a
birth rate too low to explain unless achieved by the use of
contraceptives. Restraint, delayed marriage, coitus interruptus,
non-fertile intercourse, rhythm, surgical abortion, infanticide:
it is clear that none was the method of choice. The point is
crucial and elsewhere thoughtlessly neglected. The best recent
survey of any other part of ancient medicine, R. Jackson, Doctors
and Diseases in the Roman Empire (1988) devotes only two shallow
pages (109-111) to the whole topic and is hesitant to credit the
use or efficacy of any contraceptives. Similarly two otherwise
excellent books concerned in part with ancient population growth
quickly dismiss any possibility with even less discussion: J.
Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (1992) 189-90 and M. N. Cohen,
Health and the Rise of Civilization (1989) 103, 129.
Riddle then discusses at length the abundant but neglected
evidence in Dioskorides and Soranos (16-56) for herbal (oral)
contraceptives (ATO/KIA) and abortifacients (FQO/RIA). These
chapters ought to be required reading for those who believe that
the conceptual world of Greek medicine is wholly alien to and
disjoint from ours. First, laws and precepts from Plato to Talmud
show that ancient people believed that oral contraceptives worked
to reduce fertility (16-20), and they distinguished contraception
from abortion (20-24). Riddle evaluates the prescriptions of
Soranos 1.61-3 by reference to numerous modern pharmacologic
studies which show that nearly every plant claimed as
contraceptive by Soranos and which has been tested, in fact
works. For example, Soranos (and others) advise pomegranate rind,
which when fed to guinea pigs prevents pregnancy (25-6). SI/LFION
is prescribed, now usually thought extinct, but ferujol
(extracted from another ferula species, asafetida, which the
ancients thought an inferior substitute) is "nearly 100 %
successful in preventing pregnancy up to three days after coitus
at a low dose of 0.6 mg/kg in adult female rats" (28). A third
herb is rue (PH/GANON) now used to induce abortion in horses, in
humans in Latin America, and in rats (where it also prevents
implantation) in the lab (28-9). Modern tests validate such of
Dioskorides' prescriptions as have been tested as well. The point
is important: ancient doctors knew about working oral-route
contraceptives-- and knew they knew.
Riddle next asks how widespread were the knowledge and
agents (57-65)? Literary references and modern folklore parallels
show they were wide-spread indeed. E.g., the seeds of Queen
Anne's Lace (wild carrot) were prescribed post-coitally by Diosk.
3.72 and Scr. Larg. 121, and are still used in the Western part
of Riddle's home state, North Carolina, and in India, for the
purpose--a practice validated by modern bioassays (58-9). Jokes
in Aristophanes Pax 706-12 and Lys. 87-9 turn on audience
recognition that penny-royal (BLH/XWN) was an effective
contraceptive--and it is (53-4, 59).
In order to establish the continuity of the tradition of
knowledge and practice, Riddle returns to Egyptian papyri
(66-72). Already the Kahun papyrus of ca. 1850 B.C. contains
contraceptive pessaries, of doubtful efficacy, but the recipe of
the Ebers papyrus of ca. 1550 B.C., linen soaked with honey
steeped in acacia spikes (cp. the modern sponge and diaphragm)
was probably effective (69-70), and Soranos describes similar
devices (25-6, 30). At least one oral contraceptive is prescribed
in the Berlin papyrus, ca. 1300 B.C. (72-3), of uncertain
efficacy. I am surprised that there is no information from the
very potion-oriented Mesopotamian medicine: R. Campbell Thompson,
The Assyrian Herbal (London 1924). As Riddle notes, his "study
has a conspicuous omission," China and India (154): the texts are
very difficult of access (the Indian "herbal", Charaka Samhita,
so far as I know, is available in English only in a
privately-published, unindexed version by A. Ch. Kaviratna:
Calcutta 1897-1912).
From Hippokrates to Galen, Greek medical writings contain a
variety of contraceptive prescriptions, whose known ingredients
when tested show anti-fertility effects (74-86). Such knowledge
was acquired in the same way that we have learned over centuries
and millennia which plants are edible, cure headache or heart
trouble, etc. (87). Observations of low fertility in animals by
herders allowed further discoveries (88). In the Late Roman
Empire and Early Middle Ages the tradition survived, albeit
weakened, in standard medical texts (89-107). The difficulty was
the Roman Church's well-known opposition to abortion and
contraception: yet in Macer's influential XI-A.D. herbal,
pennyroyal is still given as a birth control herb (108-117).
Arabic medicine showed no such inhibition, and is replete with
contraceptive herbs, some ancient, some new (127-34). Riddle
brings his survey down to the Renaissance (135-57) and
investigates what happened thereafter: physicians banished the
long-preserved herbalists' knowledge to the realm of superstition
(159-60). Furthermore, much of this knowledge was probably
originally resident in the oral female culture of herbalists and
midwives, who were marginalised by the professionalisation of
medicine in the XVIIII A.D. (155-7). The increasing tendency to
criminalise abortion and even contraception contributed (158-9,
161-3).
In addition to showing the efficacy, prevalence, and
continuity of know-ledge and use of oral herbal contraceptives
and abortifacients, Riddle discusses the attitudes of the
ancients, pagan, Christian, and Jewish, toward abortion and the
status of the fetus (7-10, 17-24, 62-4, 109-112). Although Riddle
treats the famous prohibition of abortive pessaries in the
Hippokratic Oath (7-10) and cites Edelstein's magisterial study,
he does not note that Edelstein argues cogently that the oath
derives from IIII-B.C. neo-pythagoreans (see Edelstein Ancient
Medicine 18-20). Riddle and Edelstein come otherwise to the same
conclusion, that from Hippokrates and Plato through Aristotle to
Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa all Greek and Roman (and Jewish)
writers more or less agreed that aborting an unformed fetus
incurred no impurity or guilt (20-24). The lone exceptions are
Musonius Rufus and Basil of Caesarea, apparently.
Riddle however misses three documents relevant to abortion
of great importance and influence, which hamartia he shares with
many scholars (not Edelstein): none have ever yet been done into
any modern language. The latest is the earliest extant
anti-abortion pamphlet, which circulated for centuries in perhaps
the most influential corpus of ancient medicine, and collects
arguments against abortion still standard. An animal sit id quod
in utero est, formerly ascribed to Galen (19.158-81 Kuehn), is
clearly a late III-A.D. neo-pythagorean or neo-platonic work (by
Iamblichos?). [Galen] makes use of the same polar dichotomy which
inflames the modern debate, and argues since the embryo has all
the parts which make a living being, uses its organs in the womb,
and when born already knows how to eat, etc., it must therefore
be a living being and hence laws should and do exist to protect
it. The earlier PRO\S *GAU=RON PERI\ TOU= PW=S E)MYUXOU=TAI TA\
E)/MBRUA of Porphyry--see K. Kalbfleisch, Abh. Akad. Wiss.
Berlin: Philol.-Hist. Kl. (1895)--was one of [Galen]'s sources
but is more complex and aporetic. Galen's own views, in de Fet.
Form. (4.652-702 K.), are, he claims, based on anatomy (652.1-9,
664.9-13, 676.7-9.1, etc.) and he concludes the embryo has liver,
heart, and brain from an early date (663.2-17), formed properly
in that order (672.7-4.5). It is Galen's teleologic God who forms
the fetus, not FU/SIS, the soul itself, or anything else
(687.5-8.15), but he hesitates to declare when a fetus has a
rational human soul (665.3-6.3, 685.1-14, 701.7-2.4).
There are copious notes (171-210) and an extensive and
valuable bibliography (211-35). Although Riddle's focus is
herbal, he might have noted W. Krenkel, "Hyperthermia in Ancient
Rome," Arethusa 8 (1975) 381-6: the hot Roman baths reduced sperm
production, and Hippokrates may have known that heating the
testicles caused temporary sterility. With reference to abortion,
add Diethard Nickel Untersuchungen zur Embryologie Galens (Berlin
1989), W. Krenkel, "Der Abortus in der Antike," WZRost 20 (1971)
443-52, and idem, "Familienplanung und Familienpolitik in der
Antike," WJA 4 (1978) 197-203.
Although it is no longer common to study classics offering
blood to ghosts, here at least the ghosts (esp. of Dioskorides
and Soranos) seem to have blood for us. Society has moved beyond
the ancients in most areas of science, and fancies it has in
politics, but it seems that the Renaissance and Enlightenment
missed A)TO/KIA. Riddle repairs that lack. In a world of fifty
myriads of myriads of people, curtailing growth would alleviate
most of our most crucial problems. According to the Cypria (fr.
1) Zeus ordained the Trojan War because the Earth groaned with
too many people. Whether or not Riddle's book influences modern
medicine (as I hope), it should influence our views of ancient
social and medical history. The ancients did seek, find, and use
effective herbal oral contraceptives and abortifacients, and
probably did so extensively. That matters for our understanding
of ancient ethics, demography, science, and women.
From: STEWARTL%WOO1.LEA1 at leav-emh.ARmy.MIL (LOU STEWART)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Medieval Sexuality
Date: 17 Feb 1994 09:01:23 -0500
In my mailbox last night was the March/April issue of _Archaeology_
which has an article titled "Birth Control in the Ancient World."
The article discusses means of contraception used in classical times
and continues to explore the reasons why the techniques used by the
ancients faded from common use during the Renaissance.
" demographic profiles of the Middle Ages provide persuasive
evidence that women used oral contraceptives and early term
abortifacients. Such demographic research, laboratory studies, and
scrutiny of ancient texts have given us new hints concerning the
effacy of ancient 'family planning.'"
According to the article, the ancient Greeks and Romans used a
plant known as Silphium, which became extinct in the 3rd or 4th
century AD, because of overharvesting. The article also explores
alternate plants used after the extinction of Silphium.
Luigsech ni Ifearnain, Calanais Nuadh, Calontir
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
From: tbarnes at silver.ucs.indiana.edu (thomas wrentmore barnes)
Subject: A Book Review: The Medieval Health Handbook
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 1994 15:51:34 GMT
Greetings from Lothar,
As promised here is my review of the book I was raving about a
couple of days ago.
You real medievalists can laugh like donkeys at my poor attempt
at a scholarly style if you wish...
THE MEDIEVAL HEALTH HANDBOOK: Tacuinium Sanitas by Luisa
Cogliati Arano translated by Adele Westbrook and Oscar Ratti. George
Brazillier Press; New York. 1976. ISBN 0-8076-1277-4. US$20.00
10" x 6", 48 color plates, 243 black and white plates, 46 page
introduction, concordance, and bibliography.
Much of medieval medicine, like modern medicine focused on
preventive measures that would ward off illness. In some respects
medieval preventive medicine was more elaborate than modern preventive
medicine since the medicine of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance was
based on predicting and balancing astrological influences and the four
bodily humors of Galenic medicine. This lead medieval physicians, like
19th c. medical reformers, to prescribe not just medicines, but proper
diet, living conditions, and activities for their patients. By the 14th
and 15th c. working on the works of the Arab physician Dioscorodies,
medieval health writers had created a genre of "health manuals" that
expanded on medieval herbals. The "Tacuinium Sanitas" is a fine example
of this genre, and the George Brazillier edition is an excellent and
easily accessible source for this manuscript.
The book begins with a 46 page history of the genre of medieval
health manuals and a discussion of the history and origins of the six
texts from which the book is collated. The illustrations and
translations of the text which make up most of the book are taken from
the Tacuinums of Leige, Paris, Vienna, and Rouen, and the Theatrum of
the Casanatense Library, Rome. All of these works were executed by work
shops in Northern Italy and Berry from the last quarter of the 14th
century to the first quarter of the 15th century with illustrations of
contemporary scenes wedded to an earlier text.
Each color plate gives a full page illustration from a page of
one of the six texts (mostly the Rouen and Leige texts) with a
translation of the text that accompanied the illustration in the
original manuscript at the bottom of the page. Each entry describes
the virtues and dangers of the item in the picture, when it is optimum
from a medicinal point of view, the nature of the humors of the item,
and the way to neutralize the dangers of the item. Plates are arranged
in alphabetical order by the latin name for each item.
As an example, and also as documentation for the Medieval Sex
thread, here is the text of pl. IX Coitus.
IX. Coitus (Coytus)
Nature: It is the union of two for the purpose of introducing
the sperm. Optimum: That which lasts until the sperm has been completely
emitted. Usefulness: It preserves the species. Dangers: It is harmful to
those with cold and dry breathing. Neutralization of the Dangers: With
sperm-producing foods. (Paris, f. 100v)
The accompanying color illustration depicts a late 14th c.-
early 15th c. couple in bed having sex in the missionary position.
Other plates give similar information about various herbs,
spices, foods, textiles, seasons, winds, emotions, and activities. The
black and white plates are reproduced 6 to a page, but have the same
text format. In many cases, the text of a given illustration has been
taken from several of the other manuscripts to accompany an illustration