The Science of Ancient Abortifacients and Classical Contraceptives
How men dominated the science of gynaecology and birth control.
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I
Many of the ancient world’s problems started with a common domestic foreboding: children will cause chaos. And so Cronos dined on his offspring right after they were born. Priam ordered a shepherd to kill his son Paris. Oedipus was abandoned on a mountain by his parents. The twins Romulus and Remus were left on the banks of the river Tiber to die. However, not one of these post-term abortion methods worked, for they all failed to avert incoming disasters. Cronos puked out his children who then detained him for all eternity in Tartarus. Paris seduced Helen of Sparta which triggered a series of events leading to Troy’s ruin. Oedipus unknowingly murdered his father, married his mother, and gave notoriety to Sigmund Freud’s ridiculous ideas. Romulus and Remus helped their grandfather reclaim his throne but the twins ended up quarrelling, leaving one dead, you all know who. All these could’ve been avoided had their parents only used contraceptives or opted to terminate their pregnancies. So, why didn’t they?
The fact that they were born, despite the counsel of oracles and omens, suggests that the idea of contraceptives and abortifacients weren’t yet conceived (pun not intended) at the time. Because if they did, prior to having Paris, Priam would’ve had him aborted — after all, he already had a dashing son in Hector who was born without ill portent. But this is a rather premature (again, nothing intentional) assessment. Extant textual evidence points to a rich ancient knowledge of preventing and terminating pregnancies. For example, in Metamorphosis, Ovid captures the anguish of a mother whose application of abortifacients ended in failure: “What herbs and what medicines did my nurse not bring to me, applying them with bold hands to drive forth entirely from my bosom . . . the burden that was increasing there! Ah, too full of life, the little thing withstood the arts employed against it, and was kept safe from its hidden foe!” The stirring lament in the failed attempt hints at the high expectation placed by the mother on the abortive agent, that she knew of its power and that its success was desperately desired by women in similar conundrums. Failure did not mean that the ancients didn’t know what abortifacients were, it’s just that they didn’t know how to make them work all the time if they indeed worked.
They also knew that conception could be prevented, thus avoiding the need for an abortion. Soranus, a Greek physician from the late 1st century CE, wrote in his book Gynaecology what is perhaps the first attempt to clearly demark the difference between an abortifacient and a contraceptive. “A contraceptive differs from an abortive for the first does not let the conception take place, while the latter destroys what has been conceived.” Knowledge of how conception happens and, conversely, how to prevent it require an extensive familiarity with human anatomy and physiognomy. Of course, Soranus knew the processes involved in pregnancy thanks to his time spent practicing as a physician in Alexandria, the foremost destination for medical scholarship and training in the ancient world (read more about it here). This providential placement gave him the opportunity to be surrounded by the greatest concentration of medical scholars at the time, which was favourable in the development of his own ideas as he had many others to learn from and discuss with. Another conducive circumstance in Soranus’ experience was Alexandria’s openness to human dissections, allowing him to peruse the inner workings of the female reproductive organ in close proximity. And then there’s the active commentary tradition in Alexandria, concerned in analysing the contents and validity of the Hippocratic texts available in the library, consequently facilitating their diffusion among the city’s circle of scholars.
When you add all these fortunate factors together, it becomes easy to contextualise Soranus’ findings within the greater framework of Greco-Egyptian medicine. As such, his knowledge of what an abortifacient is as opposed to a contraceptive very likely came from an already established medical current running at the time in Alexandria and in other parts of the ancient world. And indeed, examples of prescriptions advising the use of abortifacients and contraceptives abound in records that precede Soranus. We read from the Hippocratic text Nature of Women how a small piece of copper can be used as a long-lasting contraceptive. “If a woman does not want to become pregnant,” the text advises, “give to her in a drink of water moistened [or diluted] copper ore [misy], as much as a vicia bean, and she will not become pregnant for a year.” Although no present research proves this method’s efficacy, this instruction hints at an attempt to standardise a practice that was based on perceived success, that is, on the best “science” of their day. The specificity of dissolved misy and its quantity (“as much as a vicia bean”) is indicative of a cautious stipulation on how to use it as a contraceptive. Had they been careless, they wouldn’t have singled it out among the many potential metals and minerals. Also, the fact that the length of its effect was noted raises the probability that they did indeed do careful observations. While it could have been just a wild hunch, it could equally well have been the opposite, that its suggestion was the product of a real, material study. After all, there was no lack of curiosity and innovation in the ancient world despite the dearth of modern devices, and a review of the literature only shows that it was a time of high intellectual activity. And since these drugs and methods were the fruits of the “science” of their day, they merit conscientious consideration on their own historical terms.
II
One of the most frustrating features of doing historical research is finding little to no records left by women. As it was only a few learned men who wrote, a great body of knowledge typically familiar to women and many illiterate folks are now lost, never to be recovered. And since writing was predominantly the exclusive province of these learned men, we really cannot know how much of what they transmitted were original or were copied elsewhere. Soranus certainly did his research, but how are we to know if all that he wrote in Gynaecology were indeed from his meticulous studies, and not, say, partly conveyed to him by women? Scribonius Largus, physician to emperor Claudius, once recorded that he procured a drug for a stomach complaint from an “old lady”. He doesn’t mention the event ever again nor give any more details, leaving us with two obvious questions: what was the drug and who was that “old lady”? Hidden in most ancient documents are the silenced voices of women, illiterate folks, and conquered peoples; their whispers buried underneath the names of acclaimed figures. In the case of birth control methods, we will have to rely on what male writers wrote and carefully extrapolate from them what would’ve been knowledge already known to women, passed down from mothers to daughters and from female friends to their other female friends.
Faint echoes of their wisdom resonate in some surviving medical texts, with male writers bestowing upon them a degree of recognition that they, the women, did know things about their bodies. The Hippocratic text Diseases of Women advises physicians to let women probe themselves and check if their vulvas are “straightened”, that is to say, positioned well to welcome the male organ. Not only does this illustrate an acknowledgement of women’s familiarity with their own bodies, but it also depicts a feature of the female patient-male doctor relationship at the time. Since women knew better about their bodies, male doctors were best advised to defer to their self-judgment. Only in cases where the women were “less experienced” (had no prior pregnancy) or where medical intervention was immediately needed were the physicians to act out on their own.
However, underneath this scheme is an implicit belief in women’s explicit difference. Aristotle argued that women were “incomplete men”, especially lacking the virtue of “heat” that was principally present among males. In the humoural theory of health, balance was central in keeping the body in optimal form and shape. A lack of one virtue, principle, or humour can offset the equilibrium, triggering diseases and problems. The “incompleteness” of women, therefore, was a health concern that merited its own category as imbalance was women’s permanent state, hence why the above Hippocratic text is bluntly titled Diseases of Women. The dangerous and damaging corollary to this was that not only were women’s bodies susceptible to diseases highly different from men, but that their bodies were essentially diseases of the male form.
Understanding this dynamic is important in the discussion of ancient abortifacients and contraceptives. Since it is women who receive these methods and drugs (be it by their own volition or from social pressure), we must know how the “science” of the time viewed them. Doing so frees us from the bogus modern idea of science as purely objective, and more importantly it shows us how science is shaped by the immediate cultures and attitudes of the scientists involved. In our case, it makes us realise how ancient “scientists” usurped women’s voices and placed their words on the mouths of men who then put these words into print. This realisation alone should make us reflect on the forgotten roles women played in the development of science.
Take for instance the diversity of abortifacients and contraceptives in record. Women were offered a lot of choices on how to control their fertility. Aristotle suggests that women apply an amount of cedar oil on their cervix as this will act as a contraceptive. Then there’s Oribasius, doctor to emperor Julian the apostate, who claims in Synopsis that rubbing the juice of axe-wort on the penis before coitus will prevent conception. There were other less compromising and more modest methods available to women: Pliny writes in Natural History that women could just sneeze after copulation (taken from Hippocrates) or ingest rue, a common herb. How could male writers have known the effects of these methods? Certainly not by themselves. They either consulted women on what methods they already knew then wrote them down or suggested some ideas that the women should try out. Pliny’s (and by extension Hippocrates’) post-coital sneeze likely comes from the latter category. As pregnancy was seen as male force acting on the fertile (and “straightened”) womb of the woman, it could thus be easily cancelled by expelling the products of that force; by sneezing, the woman can effectively discharge the imprint of male action left inside her. Notice that it is not based on female knowledge of their bodies but on physical notions of forces and balances.
III
This was the scientific culture that informed physicians and scholars in their search for new drugs, chemicals, and herbs or in validating folk methods. By the Greco-Roman period, vaginal suppositories made from crocodile dung or the mixture of honey and saltpeter were not in use anymore. These recipes come from the Egyptian Kahun Medical Papyrus which dates from 1850 BCE. The fact that these had become obsolete shows that, despite it being extremely backwards in modern conventions, the prevailing scientific attitude at the time urged for innovation and correction, that it was an active spirit that propelled scholars into discovery.
Herein lies the paradox of progress.
By relegating women into subsidiary roles in the science of gynaecology and pregnancy prevention, the male scholars which dominated the field ultimately answered the needs and demands of women for birth control on their own with what they thought was best according to their science. As argued above, there were certainly a number of birth control methods already known to women, passed among themselves, which were eventually recorded, but it was the men who decided what should be written down. There was also a degree of acceding to female judgement, but it was mostly to confirm male ideas with female correspondence (“is your vulva ‘straightened’?”). And they wrote with astonishing confidence, believing most of the time that what they transmitted really worked. (There are occasions where writers take a careful stance. Pliny, for example, issues a disclaimer that the idea of rubbing juniper on the penis “before coitus prevents conception” comes from “gossip”.) Juvenal, a Roman poet from the late 1st century CE, satirised the assured attitude of the times:
“How often do gilded-beds witness a lying-in
When we’ve so many sure-fire drugs for inducing
sterility
Or killing an embryo child? Our
skilled abortionists
Know all the answers. So cheer up, my poor friend,
And given her a dose yourself.
Things might be worse-just suppose
She chose to stay pregnant.”
And it wasn’t a purely misogynistic temper that consigned women to only have ancillary participation, although it did play a part. But what fed their misogyny, and what it fed reciprocally, was the prevailing scientific ethos at the time which was the intellectual offspring of their material culture. The best minds marshalled philosophy and science to justify their views, which others conceded to and unquestionably followed. It wasn’t a bunch of misfits who deposed women in silence, but elite men of learning whose words carried weight and influence. If the towering Aristotle said that women’s bodies were too cold, then their bodies were too cold, inferior to the hot bodies of men. Who would dare go against the foremost scientific authority of antiquity? It was thus “science” that placed women along the margins of gynaecology and birth control studies.
However, it would be remiss to say that all scholars acted upon this impulse or that their works heavily reflected it. At their disposal was a rich treasury of knowledge, and one of them was an extensive ancient herbal lore which served as an important wellspring for their recommendations. Dioscorides, prime authority in ancient pharmacy, devoted portions of his monumental De Materia Medica to catalogue herbal abortifacients and contraceptives. For Dioscorides and his fellow scholars, the vast unsullied bravura of yet to be exploited natural resources offered them a promising vista of endless experimentation, discovery, and wonders. Various plants were tested for their uses, be it as spice, as ornament, or as medicament. Once they established a good use for it, they were ready to exploit the plant for as much as they possibly could — which was what happened to silphium. It was an endemic plant, believed to belong in the genus Ferula, found in Cyrene, North Africa. The locals highly revered it, so much so that their coins bore depictions of the plant. In fact, its popularity stretched outwards to many directions, making the city famous for it. Aristophanes says that it was sold at a very high price; Herodotus mentions failed attempts to cultivate the plant in other places. Silphium was highly coveted and many people wanted it no matter the cost. This extreme demand led to exorbitant harvesting, eventually spelling silphium’s doom. It is now extinct, leaving many to ponder if it indeed held the powers the ancients ascribed to it. And one of its purported powers was as a birth control herb. Both Soranus and Dioscorides recommend the plant as an oral contraceptive and abortifacient. The two might have been onto something, as recent studies on mice show that extracts from silphium’s living relatives do inhibit conception to some degree. (Disclaimer: this is not an endorsement of “natural” methods. Always consult your doctor.)
It made logical sense to look at plants for their chemical effects as sex in the ancient world had botanical overtones — the male “seed” was implanted on the woman’s fertile womb. This metaphor, however, permeates the male bias of ancient scientists: women’s wombs only act as passive soil, receptive and ready to accommodate the male germ. Adjectives describing the sexual readiness of women also display this noxious mix of botany and bias. The medical historian Helen King recounts in Producing Women: Hippocratic Gynaecology the many brutish ways the ancients called women with regards to their sexual histories:
“Unmarried virgin girls of the age for marriage are ‘ripe for marriage’, ‘tender ripe fruit’; innocent girls carried off in battle are ‘plucked unripe’; an unmarried but deflowered girl (and note our word!) is ‘rotted fruit’, ‘corrupted’, ‘gone off’.”
Like an annoying weed, the scientific belief in women’s inferiority and men’s authority over them in all things including their physiognomies resisted the tides of time and kept on surfacing for many centuries — this despite disagreements hurled at it (Hippocratic writers, while agreeing in principle to Aristotle’s conclusion of men’s superiority, disagreed about women’s cold quality). And most problematic of all, modern society still allows it to grow in patches here and there. We might as well add this to the list of catastrophes the ancients could’ve prevented had they only stopped things from further developing, babies and biases both.
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