history of contraceptives

Dittrick Medical History Center in Cleveland pays tribute to history of contraceptives

Sunday, September 12, 2010

By Marylynne Pitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

CLEVELAND -- Women who were desperate to prevent pregnancy took some frightful health risks, such as eating a poisonous plant called pennyroyal or douching with Lysol.

This is just one horrifying fact in a concise exhibition about the development of the birth control pill, which became available in America in 1960 and turned 50 this year.

This show, "Virtue, Vice and Contraband: A History of Contraception in America," is on permanent view at the Dittrick Medical History Center and might surprise two generations of American women.

Gen X-ers and Millennials, who were born into a world where oral contraceptives are advertised on television, may not know about the scientific and political efforts that were necessary to make the Pill so readily available.
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The center, part of Case Western Reserve University, owns a major collection of contraceptive literature and devices amassed over 40 years by Percy Skuy, a Canadian executive with the company Ortho, a maker of oral contraceptives. Donated in 2004, the 800-item collection also includes prototypes.

In the 1800s, literature about childbirth and reproduction was scant. American couples eager to learn about those subjects turned to "Aristotle's Masterpiece" and Charles Knowlton's 1832 book "Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People."

Condoms existed in America during the 1800s; their code names were "French letters," "safes" or "armour." They cost $1 when a week's pay was about $14. The French called them "redingotes," meaning "English riding coats."

A section devoted to sex during the Civil War reveals that more than 100,000 incidents of sexual misconduct resulted in courts-martial. The Union Army alone recorded 183,000 cases of venereal disease.

Alarmed by these statistics, Union Army leaders, from 1863-65, authorized government-sanctioned prostitution in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and hired doctors to conduct regular medical exams.

There's a good reason many Americans understood little about conception. It wasn't until 1930 that two doctors, one Japanese and the other Austrian, discovered the time of a woman's ovulation, the period when she is most fertile.

That discovery led to the "rhythm method," a natural form of birth control in which intercourse was avoided when the woman was ovulating.

During a visit to Austria in 1930, engineer Gilmore "Tilly" Tilbrook had conversations with doctors about reproductive health. He invented a precise but complicated device like the "Rythmeter."

A 1915 graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Mr. Tilbrook patented the daunting-looking device in 1944 and 1947. The inventor warned people not to use it to calculate the time of ovulation unless they had a record of a woman's previous nine menstrual cycles.

The man who tried valiantly to explain the rhythm method to Americans was Leo J. Latz, a physician, devout Catholic and author of "The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women."

By 1942, more than 200,000 copies of his work were in print; Roman Catholic priests often gave out the pamphlet as a prize to winners of parish bingoes.

Dr. Latz believed couples could use the "rhythm method" to space the births of their children. Two years after he published his research, he was fired from his teaching job at Loyola University in 1934. Apparently, Dr. Latz was ahead of his time. In 1951, Pope Pius XII sanctioned rhythm as a natural form of birth control.

This show highlights the work of Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood and coined the phrase "birth control." Ms. Sanger worked closely with suffragist Katharine McCormick, who earned a biology degree at M.I.T. and was the heiress to a large fortune from the International Harvester Co. Mrs. McCormick bankrolled research on oral contraceptives in the 1950s. Contraception also became part of popular culture. The exhibition includes a recording by country singer Loretta Lynn, who was married at 14 and had six children. By the time the songwriter wrote and recorded her own anthem, "The Pill," in 1975, millions of women were taking oral contraceptives.

Ms. Lynn's lyrics express the freedom from repetitive childbearing that oral contraceptives gave women.

"This old maternity dress I've got is goin' in the garbage. The clothes I'm wearin' from now on won't take up so much yardage."