Charles Knowlton was the first person in the history of the birth control movement to go to prison for advocating and writing a pamphlet on birth control. It probably was the most influential nineteenth-century tract on the subject. Born in rural Worcester County in Massachusetts to a moderately well-off family, Knowlton attended the local school and was apparently a more or less average student. He began worrying in his teens about his proclivity for what we would now call wet dreams and was convinced that he had a serious illness. In his hypochondria, he consulted numerous physicians, and despite faithfully following their advice, he remained a pale, debilitated, nervous, and gloomy young man. He seemed to get better when he underwent electric shock treatment. He then married the daughter of the person who administered the shocks and made a quick recovery from almost all of his ailments. Inevitably he advised marriage as the remedy for the disorder that had afflicted him.
Knowlton studied medicine with various physicians, but believed he needed a better anatomical knowledge, so he broke into the local graveyard, took out a recently deceased subject, and dissected the corpse after first removing the teeth and any possible identifying marks. Apparently he continued to do illegal dissection because he later spent two months in jail for illegal dissections. His father paid more than $250 in costs to prevent his remaining there any longer. Knowlton went on to attend lectures at the Dartmouth Medical School, from which he received his medical degree in 1824.
Extremely ambitious, Knowlton conceived himself to be a new John Locke, and to demonstrate he wrote and self-published his book, Elements of Modern Materialism. When it did not sell anywhere near the 1,000 copies he had ordered, he had to sell all his household goods to satisfy his creditors. He returned to medicine and opened up a practice in Ashfield, a town of about 1,800 people in Massachusetts. Like many of the other nineteenth-century advocates of birth control, Knowlton was a freethinker who liked to scandalize the local churchgoers by playing his violin on Sunday mornings while they were going to church.
Early in his medical career, Knowlton had come to believe not only that young couples often suffered financial burdens because of too frequent births but that the too frequent births also led to ill health in the mother as well. He began giving out contraceptive advice and also wrote a manuscript that he handed out. He decided to make his advice available to a large public and in 1832 published anonymously in New York a booklet entitled Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People by a Physician. No copy of the first edition is believed to have survived but there are extant copies of the second published in 1833. It was probably the most influential tract of its kind, although unfortunately his methods were not equal to his influence. Knowlton relied chiefly on douching, which consisted of syringing the vagina with some liquid soon after the male emission into it, which would not merely dislodge nearly all the semen, as simple water would do, but which would destroy the fecundating property of any portion of semen that remained (Knowlton, 1937, p. 60).
For a douching Knowlton recommend a solution of alum with infusions of almost any astringent herbs such as green pea, raspberry leaves, or white oak or hemlock bark. For some cases he recommended the use of sulfate of zinc in combination with alum salts. Actually alum would have been fairly effective as a sper-matocide but the same cannot be said for zinc sulfate. He also recommended the use of salt water, vinegar, and bicarbonate of soda. For even alum to be effective it would have had to be used almost immediately after intercourse and even then it would not be entirely successful.
Knowlton urged his readers to pay careful attention to what he wrote because the subject was of such a great and abiding importance that it deserved study and pondering. He said that some people might believe that the knowledge of the practices he advocated would lead to illicit intercourse, but he replied that if a woman’s chastity could be overcome, it could be overcome without the knowledge he wanted to impart. Knowlton said that some had also claimed that such practices were against nature, but he answered that civilized life was one continuous battle against nature, and birth control methods would not change that. Rather conception control would prevent overpopulation; mitigate the evil of prostitution; reduce poverty, ignorance, and crime; help prevent hereditary diseases and preserve and improve the species; reduce the number of artificial abortions and diminish infanticide; and prevent ill health caused to women by excessive childbearing or habitual abortion.
Knowlton had some difficulty in getting his book accepted. He was fined in 1832 at Taunton, Massachusetts, and in 1833 he was jailed at Cambridge for three months for attempting to distribute it. A third attempt to convict him in Greenfield, Massachusetts, led to disagreement between two different juries and the dropping of the case. As in many other cases of attempted censorship, the effect of his trial was to so publicize his work that by 1839 it had sold 10,000 copies.The last authorized U.S. edition was published in 1877 but the book continued to be published in England after that. Knowlton himself more or less retired from the fray and in 1844 was elected a Fellow of the Massachusetts Medical Society. He continued to write articles on a variety of medical topics until his death.
