As indicated in the entry on herbal contraceptives and abortifacients, many plants and other items were believed to have contraceptive and abortifacient value. Much of this information was oral tradition, although some crept into the medical writings. People in the Middle Ages studied plants for medicinal purposes and “wise” women or midwives often kept alive the ancient tradition. When the medical universities developed in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ancient classics were studied and new data were added. In the sixteenth century, modern botany was born in northern universities where German was spoken and the result, because of the difference in the language used, was a division between botany and pharmaceuticals, although much overlap remained.
The transition from the classical to the medieval to the modern tradition to a new type of recipe book is the Dispensatorium of Valerius Cordus. Issued in 1546, the Dispensatorium became a standard for apothecaries throughout much of Europe, with others adding to it or basing their own book upon it. Although no contraceptives or abortifacients are specifically listed as such by Cordus, there were many substances that had that effect, mainly in his listing of menstrual stimulants. Many of his recipes included multiple herbs such as myrtle, lupine, rue, wild mint, pennyroyal, cumin, blackberries, asafeti-da, sagapenia, opopanax, geraniums, and artemisia. All told he gave nearly a dozen recipes for menstrual regulation, all of them containing familiar abortifacient drugs.
Mostly the recipe books used very discrete language, avoiding the words for abortion or birth control, but there are major exceptions. Hans Jakob Wecker (1528—1586) openly listed some forty-five plants and three animal products that had abortifacient or contraceptive value. He also began to produce new distillates and prepared medicines, a sign of the changing nature of the apothecary art. Johann Schroeder in 1641 updated the recipes and added many new distillates and extractions. He also continued to list abortifacient drugs, many of them the classical herbs such as artemisia, calamint, juniper, squirting cucumber, and others familiar to the classical and medieval world.
Increasingly physicians began to write about obstetrical subjects. Eucharius Rosslin (c. 1500—1526), who started as a pharmacist before becoming a physician, wrote a book in German that would translate into English as The Pregnant Woman’s and Midwife’s Rose Garden. He also dealt openly with abortion, arguing that if a woman’s life was in peril, even if she just thought it was, such a belief would justify medical intervention to bring about an abortion. Some signs of danger for the physician to look for were trances, general weakness and feebleness, an inability to eat meat, and a rapid pulse. Rosslin advised first using recipes beginning with fumigants (drugs administered by inhalation) and then graduating, if needed, to oral drugs, followed by pessaries, and if all failed, surgical intervention was the final alternative.
Most sixteenth and seventeenth century books by physicians dealing with diseases of women started with menstruation and a list of drugs to relieve menstrual retention, many of which were traditional abortifacients. Some books, such as that by the English physician James Primrose (1598—1659), mentioned drugs that induce sterility, which is another way of describing contraception especially if it was for short-term sterility. One of the early books by a woman was that by Jane Sharp, who in 1671 published a guide for midwives. She did not mention contraceptives directly but rather described things harmful to conception such as ivy berries or wearing sapphire or emerald stones, a mixture of reality and magic. She was, however, more serious in her list of menstrual stimulants (and abortifacients), including artemisia, tansy, pennyroyal, and catnip. She also made mention of alpine snakeroot, which also has abortifacient activity.
Was there a distinction between a contraceptive and abortifacient in the minds of the women involved? One indication that at least some lay persons tried to distinguish the difference appears in the play Matrimonial Whoredom by Daniel Defoe (1727). One scene portrays a bride discussing with her cousin what might be called family planning. The cousins equated abortion and contraception, claiming that it was the “same thing to prevent a conception as to destroye [sic] the child after it is conceived.” The cousin recommended the bride take a physick, which would kill an unwanted conceptus. The bride replied that she would not do that but she would take a contraceptive. The cousin responded that she could not understand the niceties involved: “I would not be with Child, that’s all; there’s no harm in that, I hope.”
John Riddle has argued that, in spite of the lack of listing about contraceptives, there had almost always been a widespread folk knowledge about them that women passed down from generation to generation, but now adding to this unwritten tradition among women were herbals aimed at a general public. Although most printed herbals were intended for apothecaries and physicians and were usually written in Latin, not all were. One that was aimed at the general public was written by Nicholas Culpeper (1650), and being ever cautious he usually listed contraceptives and abortifacients in negative terms. For example, he warned that the fern called fililx as well as laurel were dangerous for pregnant women because they might cause a miscarriage. Dittany and iris might have the same consequences. Other plants or plant products derived from artemisia, carrot seeds, lilies, myrrh, and tamarisk were to be taken to stimulate menstruation.Two contraceptives are listed in even more negative ways: rue and wild mint, both of which were said to be an enemy to generation for those who consumed their seeds. Culpeper later translated a medicinal guide that intended to give guidance to the poor and originally was written by the continental physician Jean Prevost (1662). It included a list of drugs to extinguish a man’s semen and to impede generation such as chaste tree, rue, juniper, ginger, and willow, as well as drugs to stimulate menstruation. Again the subject of abortion is not specifically mentioned.
Obviously information was available, some of it quite accurate, and the midwives and apothecaries knew about it, and so increasingly did the literary public. But there were gaps, and the professional physician often seemed to be ignorant, or at least had to appear to be ignorant. Riddle mentioned the case of a French Dr. Olivier who wrote in 1760 about an interesting case in his medical practice. A woman six months pregnant came to him and explained that she no longer felt any movement. After an examination, he concluded that her fetus was dead but he did not know what to do. He then turned to some of the classical texts to read about expulsives or abortifacients and on the basis of these texts prepared a decoction, which she drank. The same day she aborted. The implications of this are that the medical training for physicians avoided such topics and his solution was considered important enough to be published in a medical journal.
Even though the nineteenth century saw increasing legal objections to abortion, it seems clear that most of the drugs used for abortion and contraception continued to be sold in pharmacies and drug stores. Usually the various guides said that certain drugs, most of those mentioned above, were not to be given to pregnant women and used only to treat amenorrhea or absence of menstruation. The popular medical and sexual advice manual entitled Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which was widespread in colonial America and continued to be printed up to the twentieth century, included a long list of menstrual stimulators. With the development of patent medicines in the nineteenth century, nearly every newspaper carried advertisements for women’s medicines designed to deal with menstrual problems. So widespread was the recognition of the potential use for abortion of some of these pills that one German proprietor of an apothecary shop required his customers to sign a statement that they were not taking the menstrual regulators to terminate pregnancy but only to restore the monthly cycle.
Though physicians were increasingly dubious about many of the remedies, interviews of some 2,000 women conducted by James Whitehead at the Manchester Lying-in Hospital in the 1840s found that 747 reported that they had aborted at least once; and some, many times, mostly by taking strong purgatives, emmenagogues (menstrual regulators), or mercurial medicines. Whitehead doubted that some of the medicines actually caused the abortion without other predisposing causes, but what these might have been are unclear.
What seems clear is that, in spite of a growing medical reticence to become involved in abortion and birth control, especially in nineteenth century United States, there was a widespread availability of pills and remedies, which women were led to believe could restore their menstrual flow, even though the preparations were not labeled as abortifacients or contraceptives.
