Conclusions
Early scientific investigation of the reproductive process was neither a cause nor a direct result of changing social attitudes toward sex. It was instead part of the continuing search, initiated in the 1890s, to discover internal secretions that might be isolated and prove useful in therapy. Laboratory scientists, nonetheless, were among the many groups altering understanding of human sexual physiology in the first quarter of this century. The new data they generated regarding the dependence of human sexuality and fertility on chemical substances elaborated by the ovaries and testes became part of the evidence which hastened that quite tortuous transformation called the sexual revolution.
Increasingly, as social reformers demanded more information about human reproduction, scientists were asked to provide it, and scientific concerns were shaped in the process. In the 1920s, especially in the United States, studies of the physiology of reproduction began to receive financial backing from social reformers. This was because for many, contraception had become a fact of life. Expression rather than repression of sexuality was accepted as being necessary to the stability of the fundamental social unit, the family. Theoretical and practical incentives for continued study of the reproductive process could thus be joined in common effort. This convergence of goals occurred just as the gonadal hormones were being isolated. The 1920s, therefore, mark an important juncture in the congruence of interests represented by theoretical science on the one hand and expressed social needs on the other.
As a result of this convergence of interests and goals, physiologists gained a new realm of influence, claiming authoritative knowledge over a subject which once had been allocated to the priest and then, by the mid-nineteenth century, transferred to the physician. Since that formative period other research scientists, such as Alfred Kinsey and, more recently, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, have explored that niche and applied the scientific method to study of behavioral and physiological aspects of the human sexual response. They have been beset by many of the same tactical issues that confronted the earliest investigators of reproductive physiology. The definition, specification, and measurement of phenomena relating to sexual and reproductive activity have been as inherently difficult as they have been taboo.79
Traditional resistance to scientific study of the reproductive process was overcome in the early twentieth century by the expectation that this particular line of inquiry would lead to understanding and therefore medical control of the complex of disorders—physiological, psychological, and social — associated with the generative glands. Early investigators, particularly in Britain, did not wish to be social reformers. Especially in the 1910s such a stance would have threatened their credibility in a field determined to establish itself as a theoretical science. Once scientific progress was assured, as it was from about 1920, new problems opened for investigation and began to be motivated by social needs as well as by the concerns of a rapidly developing science. Especially in the United States new resources encouraged this work, allowing development of the specialized focus on gonadal hormones represented by the emerging field of reproductive endocrinology.
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Reference
A. S. Parkes, “The Rise of Reproductive Endocrinology, 1926–1940”, J. Endocrinol., 34, (1966), xx-xxxii; idem, Sex, Science and Society: Addresses, Lectures and Articles (Newcastle upon Tyne: Oriel Press, 1966). In these works Parkes recounts the background to the now-classic discoveries of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The present paper explores the scientific issues that made the problem of reproduction interesting to investigators prior to that period and indicates the social context in which such inquiries were promoted in Britain and the United States.
Merriley Borell, “Brown-Séquard's Organotherapy and Its Appearance in America at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Bull. Hist. Med., 50 (1976), pp. 309–320.
Merriley Borell, “Organotherapy, British Physiology and Discovery of the Internal Secretions,” J. Hist. Biol., 9 (1976), 235–268.
Merriley Borell, “Origins of the Hormone Concept: Internal Secretions and Physiological Research, 1889–1905,” (Ph. D. Diss., Yale University, 1976). See pp. 24–57 for a detailed discussion of the response to the new therapeutics. By the early 1890s, extirpation experiments had suggested a relation between myxedema, cretinism, and disordered thyroid function, diabetes and pancreatic dysfunction, and Addison's disease and adrenal pathology. When successfully employed as therapeutic agents, organ extracts provided one means of confirming these relationships. In the specific case of gonadal extracts, Brown-Séquard had cited (in a report published in 1893) cures or ameliorations of the following diseases via testicular extract: locomotor ataxia, sclerosis of the spinal cord, pulmonary tuberculosis, cancer, paralysis agitans, sugar diabetes, polyuria, anemia, asthenia, arteriosclerosis, sclerosis of the heart, albuminuria, various types of paralysis, neuritis, gangrene, Addison's disease, exophthalmic goiter, fibrous tumors, debilities due to age, influenza, hysteria, chorea, neuralgia, migraine, certain forms of rheumatism, gout, malaria, and neurasthenia. See [C.-E.] Brown-Séquard and [A.] d'Arsonval, “Effets physiologiques et thérapeutiques d'un liquide extrait de la gland sexuelle mâle,” Comp. Rend. Acad. Sci., 116 (1893), 856–861. Subsequent clinical reports conflicted and were difficult to evaluate. Physiologists especially did not consider them reliable. A number of nervous disorders like hysteria and neurasthenia, soon to be absorbed by psychoanalytic theory, appeared to respond to any new therapeutic regimen introduced by the hopeful practitioner. Moreover, the specific agents of many of the infectious diseases had not yet been identified, and some of these conditions also seemed to respond to extracts. As the infectious agents were discovered, the cures by testicular extract were called into question.
On the professionalization of physiology see Joseph Schiller, “Physiology's Struggle for Independence in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Hist. Sci., 7 (1968), 64–89, as well as Gerald Geison, “Social and Institutional Factors in the Stagnancy of English Physiology, 1840–1870,” Bull. Hist. Med., 46 (1972), 30–58.
Cf. Hans Meyer, “The Herter Lecture: The Contributions of Pharmacology to Physiology. Lectures I and II,” Johns Hopkins Bulletin, 16 (1905), 351–352. In this address Meyer noted: “For the explanation and analysis of physiological function, apart from comparative physiology, stimulation and extirpation of certain organs or parts of organs serve as general methods. Experimental physiology employed to this end mechanical and physical means almost exclusively [until recently].”
George R. Murray, “Note on the Treatment of Myxoedema by Hypodermic Injections of an Extract of the Thyroid Gland of a Sheep,” Brit. Med. J., 2 (1891), 796–797. See Borell, “Organotherapy,” pp. 244—250, for a complete analysis of the events that followed.
Merriley Borell, “Setting the Standards for a New Science: Edward Schäfer and Endocrinology,” Med. Hist., 22 (1978), 282–290.
For an analysis of the situation in the early 1920s see Diana Long Hall, “The Critic and the Advocate: Contrasting Views on the State of Endocrinology in the early 1920s,” J. Hist. Biol., 9 (1976), 269–285; and Thomas F. Glick, “On the Diffusion of a New Specialty: Marañon and the ‘Crisis’ of Endocrinology in Spain,” ibid., pp. 287–300.
Merriley Borell, “Brown-Séquard's Organotherapy and Its Appearance in American at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Bull. Hist. Med., 50 (1976), pp. 309–320; idem, “Origins of the Hormone Concept,” chap. 1.
For extensive excerpts and citations from this interesting literature, see John A. Haller and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974). For a social analysis, see Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961). Also useful are Gail Pat Parsons, “Equal Treatment for All: American Medical Remedies for Male Sexual Problems, 1850–1900,” J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 33 (1977), 55–71; Vern R. Bullough, Sex, Society and History (New York: Neal Watson Academic Publications, 1976); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Arthur M. Gilbert, “Doctor, Patient, and Onanist Diseases in the Nineteenth Century,” J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 30 (1975), 217–234; G. Tristam Englehardt, Jr., “The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of Disease,” Bull. Hist. Med., 48 (1974), 234–248; Ben Barker-Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of Sexuality,” Feminist Stud., 1 (1972), 45–74.
Although such “facts” have been widely reviewed in the secondary historical literature, their medical and scientific origins remain obscure. Most nineteenth-century physicians seemed content to cite the ancients as authorities. In his provocative article “Some Secular Attitudes toward Sexual Behavior in France, 1760–1860,” Fr. Hist. Stud., 8 (1974), 604–625, Angus McLaren suggested that “in the eighteenth century doctors described the disease of onanism in such a way that it tallied with traditional religious teachings; in the nineteenth century priests relied on the support of medical reports to back up their moral injunctions” (p. 623). The origin of those medical reports upon which priests and, indeed, physicians relied remains unclear. With present knowledge, McLaren's analysis in “Doctor in the House: Medicine and Private Morality in France, 1800–1850,” Feminist Stud., 2 (1974–1975), 39–54, seems quite valid. He observed (p. 51) that “old sexual myths, now declared to be scientific truths, were given new life.” It would be worthwhile for historians to investigate further how this transformation was accomplished. Certainly the interplay of social and scientific issues in the evaluation of masturbatory “disease” deserves further evaluation.
I have found no criticism of Brown-Séquard's experiments on the basis of physiological theory. It was the social implications of his claims that aroused particular antagonism within the medical community, especially in Britain. See Merriley Borell, “Brown-Séquard's Organotherapy and Its Appearance in America at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Bull. Hist. Med., 50 (1976), pp. 238–239.
See Edward A. Schäfer, “Address in Physiology on Internal Secretions,” delivered at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, Lancet, 2 (1895), 321–324; Borell, “Organotherapy,” pp. 255–267.
Consider comments published by Schäfer in 1895 and 1898: “the changes [following removal of the generative glands] are without a doubt produced through the nervous system, and are not connected with the internal secretion of the glands” (“Address in Physiology,” p. 321); and the ovary and testes probably “react upon the rest of the organism through the nervous system” (Text-book of Physiology, [Edinburgh and London: Young J. Pentland, 1898] p. 937). For an analysis of the scientific entrenchment of such ideas with regard to the causation of menstruation, see Hans H. Simmer, “Pflüger's Nerve Reflex Theory of Menstruation: The Product of Analogy, Teleology and Neurophysiology,” Clio Medica, 12 (1977), 57–90.
Schäfer did not make these demands for gonadal preparations. Neither extirpation nor transplantations of the testes and ovaries were reported from his laboratory until after 1903, although routine experiments on the effects of gonadal extracts on blood pressure had been performed from the mid-1890s on.
G. Oliver and E. A. Schäfer, “On the Physiological Action of Extract of the Supra-renal Capsules,” J. Physiol., 16 (1894), i-iv. This paper was followed by two other communications: idem, “On the Physiological Action of the Suprarenal Capsules (Second Preliminary Communication),” J. Physiol., 17 (1894–95), ix–xiv; idem, “The Physiological Effects of Extracts of the Suprarenal Capsules,” J. Physiol., 18 (1895), 230–276.
Consider G. Oliver and E. A. Schäfer, “On the Physiological Action of Extracts of Pituitary Body and Certain Other Glandular Organs (Preliminary Communication),” J. Physiol., 18 (1895), 277–279.
The active principle inducing the pressor responses detected by Oliver and Schäfer was isolated by Abel in 1899, crystallized independently by Aldrich and Takamine in 1901, and synthesized nearly simultaneously by Stolz and Dakin in 1904 and 1905. For full citations see Chandler McC Brooks, J. L. Gilbert, H. A. Levey, and D. R. Curtis, Humors, Hormones and Neurosecretions: The Origins and Development of Man's Present Knowledge of the Humoral Control of Body Function (New York: State University of New York, 1962), p. 53. The new drug became useful in both laboratory and clinic-in the former as a tool to investigate neuromuscular function, in the latter as a hemostatic. See George R. Murray, “Discussion on the Therapeutic Value of Hormones,” Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., 7 (1914), Therapeutic and Pharmacological Section, 27. In this discussion Murray mentioned that adrenalin “stimulates the sympathetic system by its action on the myoneural junction.” This action had been studied in the laboratory by John Newport Langley (1852–1925) and Thomas Renton Elliott (1877–1961) shortly after pure preparations of adrenalin had become available. See also Borell, “Origins of the Hormone Concept,” pp. 145–153.
W. M. Bayliss and Ernest H. Starling, “On the Causation of the So-called ‘Peripheral Reflex Secretion’ of the Pancreas” (Preliminary Communication), Proc. Roy. Soc. London, 69 (1901–2), 352–353; idem, “The Mechanism of Pancreatic Secretion” J. Physiol., 28 (1902), 325–353.
For a summary of these attempts see Borell, “Origins of the Hormone Concept,” pp. 159–161.
Ernest Henry Starling, The Croonian Lectures on the Chemical Correlations of the Body (London: Women's Printing Society, 1905), p. 6: “These chemical messengers ... or ‘hormones’ (from βpμàω I excite or arouse), as we may call them, have to be carried from the organ where they are produced to the organ which they affect, by means of the blood stream, and the continually recurring physiological needs of the organism must determine their repeated production and circulation through the body.”
This debate became acute in the late 1910s and early 1920s, just prior to the preparation of insulin by banting and Best (1922) and the isolation of an active follicular extract by Allen and Doisy (1923). In the following years, from 1929 to 1935, the gonadal hormones and the hypophysial, placental, and endometrial gonadotrophins were all recognized. Cf. Parkes, “Rise of Reproductive Endocrinology,” p. xx.
This is noted very explicitly by Corner in his essay, ‘Our Knowledge of the Menstrual Cycle, 1910–1950,” Lancet, 1 (1951), 919–923.
Corner has recalled the significance of his own work on the cycle in the sow undertaken in 1919: “Against its framework I could perceive, much more precisely than before, the nature of the histological events and the time relation between them that would have to be explained physiologically in both the animal and the human cycle” (ibid., p. 920).
See George W. Corner, “The Early History of the Oestrogenic Hormones,” J. Endocrinol., 31 (1964–65), iii-xxxii, esp. pp. iii-viii; H. H. Simmer, “Josef Halban (1870–1937): Pioneer der Endokrinologie der Fortpflanzung,” Wien. Med. Wochenschr., 121 (1971), 549–552. German-speaking workers began in the 1870s to catalogue the effects of castration. I am grateful to Dr. Simmer for information on this point.
Simmer, “Joseph Halban,” esp. p. 552.
E. A. Schäfer, “The Hormones Which are Contained in Animal Extracts: Their Physiological Effects,” Pharm. J., 79 (1907), 670–674; quotation on P. 670. Marshall had been Carnegie Fellow in the University while Jolly was Schäfer's assistant in the Physiology Laboratory. Schäfer had moved from University College, London, to Edinburgh in 1899.
Castrate atrophy of the uterus had been noted by medical writers in the 1870s when oophorectomy became popular as a treatment of dysmenorrhea and various neuroses. However, it was not until the 1890s that these observations were followed by grafting experiments. Two Viennese gynecologists, Emil Knauer (1896) and Josef Halban (1900), then noted that the ovary probably produced some special substance which normally maintained the uterus. See Corner, “Early History,” pp. iv-vii.
E. A. Schäfer, “The Hormones Which are Contained in Animal Extracts: Their Physiological Effects,” Pharm. J., 79 (1907), pp. 670–671.
p. 671. Marshall and Jolly suggested in 1905 that the ovary produces two distinct internal secretions — one related to estrus, the other to pregnancy. See Francis H. A. Marshall and William A. Jolly, “Contributions to the Physiology of Mammalian Reproduction: Part I — The Oestrus Cycle of the Dog; Part II — The Ovary as an Organ of Internal Secretion,” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London, ser. B, 198 (1905–6), 99–141. However, the existence of an internal secretion of the ovary had already been postulated and demonstrated by Continental workers. See H. H. Simmer, “The First Experiments to Demonstrate an Endocrine Function of the Corpus Luteum. On the Occasion of the 100. Birthday of Ludwig Fraenkel (1870–1951),” Sudhoffs Arch., 55 (1971), 392–417; 56 (1972), 76–99.
Schäfer, “Hormones in Animal Extracts”, p. 671.
Francis H. A. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction (London: Longmans, Green, 1910).
A. S. Parkes, “Francis Hugh Adam Marshall, 1878–1949,” Obit. Not. Fell. Roy. Soc., 7 (1905–51), 239–251. Marshall studied Greek at University College and zoology, geology, and chemistry at Christ's College, Cambridge, obtaining a Second Class in the Natural Science Tripos Part I in 1899 and Third Class in Part II in 1990. Parkes was himself tutored by Marshall.
Ewart appears to have been Schäfer's cousin. This relationship is suggested by the labeling of a photograph (number 20182) in the Sharpey-Schafer Collection at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London.
A. S. Parkes, “Francis Hugh Adam Marshall, 1878–1949,” Obit. Not. Fell. Roy. Soc., 7 (1905–51), pp. 241–245. Telegony refers to the permanent influence of a previous mating on a female subsequently fertilized by another sire. Telegony was accepted by Darwin, but disproved at the turn of the century by Ewart and others. See Marshall, Physiology of Reproduction, pp. 201–202.
Correspondence in the Sharpey-Schafer Collection at the Wellcome Institute does not explain the circumstances of their meeting. However, their relationship was warm and cordial for many years, and Schäfer wanted Marshall to return to Edinburgh from Cambridge in 1919.
Parkes, “Marshall,” p. 245. Marshall noted in his introduction to The Physiology of Reproduction (p. 3): “Indeed, it is not too much to say that had it not been for him [Schäfer], the book would scarcely have been written.” Private correspondence between the two men confirms this indebtedness. While tactfully asking Schäfer to amend a too flattering preface to his book, Marshall wrote in 1910: “The chief reason why I asked you to write a preface was because the book was planned out and to a large extent written when I was working in your laboratory, and I felt (and still feel) that it might be associated with Edinburgh and you.” (Letter, F. H. A. Marshall to E. A. Schäfer, June 19, 1910, Sharpey-Schafer Collection, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London). Scientifically, Marshall was also influenced by Walter Heape.
Artur Biedl, Innere Sekretion: Ihre physiologischen Grundlagen und ihre Bedeutung für die Pathologie (Berlin: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1910). The English edition, The Internal Secretory Organs: Their Physiology and Pathology, translated by Linda Forster (New York: William Wood & Company), appeared in 1913. By this time Swale Vincent's text, Internal Secretion and the Ductless Glands (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), was already available. Vincent (1868–1933) and Marshall worked together briefly in Schäfer's laboratory in 1903; cf. Marshall and Jolly, “Contributions”, p. 100.
Francis H. A. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction (London: Longmans, Green, 1910). p. 1.
Francis H. A. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction (London: Longmans, Green, 1910). p. 1.
Francis H. A. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction (London: Longmans, Green, 1910). p. 2.
Stockard and Papanicolaou's work on the vaginal cycle of the guinea pig appeared in 1917. See Corner, “Knowledge of the Menstrual Cycle,” p. 920, for a discussion of its significance. British physiologists had generally ignored study of the process of reproduction, considering it more appropriate to the domain of the histologist and the morphologist. Schäfer wrote in his introduction to volume 1 of the Text-book of Physiology that the edited, “The subjects of generation and reproduction have been omitted in this text-book, because, although strictly speaking appertaining to physiology, they are studied almost entirely by morphological methods, and are more conveniently treated in connection with morphology” (p. ix). Rudolf Vollman has directed my attention to the importance of morphological investigations by nineteenth-century Continental workers, among them Négrier, Raciborsky, and Pouchet. These studies are discussed in McLaren, “Doctor in the House,” pp. 48–49, and C. V. Medvei, A History of Endocrinology (Boston and The Hague: MTP Press, 1982), p. 361.
Cf. Corner, “Knowledge of the Menstrual Cycle”; idem, “Early History of Oestrogenic Hormones”; Parkes, “Rise of Reproductive Endocrinology”; idem, Sex, Science and Society. Hans Simmer has also published an important series of papers on the early history of reproductive endocrinology. I am especially grateful to him for critical comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Medvei discusses this entire literature in detail in A History of Endocrinology, chaps. 17–19.
Michael Bliss provides a vivid account of the difficulties in his book The Discovery of Insulin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
It was Starling, Schäfer's successor at University College, who extolled the theoretical merits of endocrine investigations. Schäfer himself stressed the significance of such studies for medical understanding of endocrine dysfunction. Although both physiologists promised control of the disease process, only Starling emphasized that such studies also led to specification of the causal sequences underlying physiological events. This difference is a product of the professional status of physiology in Britain when each man “came of age” in his chosen field.
Collaboration of biologists, physicians, and social scientists in the promotion of the study of problems of sex emerged in the 1920s. For background to the social setting of American research in this field, see Sophie D. Aberle and George W. Corner, Twenty-five Years of Sex Research: History of the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, 1922–1947 (Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders, 1953), esp. pp. 1–8. The expectation that data from the laboratory would be directly relevant to the solution of important social problems is particularly apparent here. In Britain social and scientific issues were not so obviously related until the end of the decade. The reluctance of British workers to study the reproductive process may be attributed in part to the professional goals of physiologists of that country (cf. Borell, “Setting the Standards,” esp. pp. 289–290). The British literature of reproductive physiology in the 1910s and early 1920s was self-consciously devoid of social comment, despite the activity of advocates of social hygiene, family limitation, eugenics, and women's rights. However, eugenic issues, in the sense of a declining birth rate among the fit, were referred to by Marshall in both editions of his Physiology of Reproduction. In the mid-1920s, British physiologists were gradually drawn into these discussions of social issues.
For analyses of these changes in social attitudes toward contraception in both Britian and the United States, see Clive Wood and Beryl Suitters, The Fight for Acceptance: A History of Contraception (Aylesbury: Medical and Technical Publishing Co., 1970), esp. chaps. 8 and 9; and Richard Allen Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Also useful are David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); and Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (New York: Schocken Books, 1970). I discuss the effects of the changes and the subsequent recruitment of research scientists to the birth control movement in my paper, “Biologists and the Promotion of Birth Control Research, 1918–1938,” J. Hist. Biol. (in process).
National Council of Public Morals, Medical Aspects of Contraception, Being the Report of the Medical Committee appointed by the National Council of Public Morals in connection with investigations of the National Birth-rate Commission (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1927) (referred to hereafter as Medical Aspects).
National Council of Public Morals, Medical Aspects of Contraception, Being the Report of the Medical Committee appointed by the National Council of Public Morals in connection with investigations of the National Birth-rate Commission (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1927) p. vi. The National Birth-rate Commission was established in 1913. Its sixty participants, authorities in “religion, science, statistics, economics and education,” produced the 1916 report. The parent organization, the National Council of Public Morals was a voluntary organization supported by charitable contributions (ibid., p. xi). The 1916 report, edited by James Marchant, was entitled The Declining Birth-Rate, Its Causes and Effects, Being the Report of and the Chief Evidence Taken by the National Birth-Rate Commission, Instituted, with Official Recognition by the National Council of Public Morals-for the Promotion of Race Regeneration-Spiritual, Moral, and Physical.” See Soloway for a full discussion of this and other reports initiated by the NCPM.
One reviewer of the report, Sidney Webb, noted in the New Statesman: “The National Council of Public Morals has done a great public service. The Commission has produced the most candid, the most outspoken, and the most impartial statement that this country has yet had as to the extent, the nature, and the ethical character of the voluntary regulation of the marriage state which now prevails over the greater part of the world” (cited in Medical Aspects, p. vi.)
The Practitioner, July 1923, Special issue on Contraception. Consider: “Now to sum up; contracepts undoubtedly tend to produce ill-health in both husband and wife, and the resulting nervous irritability tends to banish the harmony and love that should subsist between them. The children that are permitted to come into existence lose all the gaieties and joys of child-life. If the advocates of these self-limiting practices are successful in making them at all widespread, the land will be cumbered by a weakly degenerated race of neurasthenics and hypochondriacs, not a small percentage of whom will drift into lunatic asylums where, poor creatures, they will be in the midst of their fellow masturbators. Nature is a stern goddess, who relentlessly punishes those who set at naught her beneficent ordinances.” This statement concludes “Birth Control and Economy,” by Henry Corby, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, University College, Cork (pp. 62–73). Corby modified nineteenth-century arguments against contraception to include new scientific evidence that the testes produce important chemical substances. He concluded that male and female secretions must mix, or else pathological congestion of the testicles would result. As the use of condoms prevented this mixus, intercourse became mere masturbation. Disease would certainly result.
The other members of the committee were Charles Gibbs (chairman), Sir Arthur Newsholme (vice-chairman), C. J. Bond, A. K. Chalmers, Agnes Dunnett, J. S. Fairbairn, Letitia D. Fairfield, A. E. Giles, Frances Ivers, Charles Porter, Herbert R. Spencer, and Sir James Merchant (Medical Aspects, p. xv).
Ibid., p. x.
Ibid., p. xvi.
Ibid.
Ibid.
The report continued: “In the absence of satisfactory statistics, the Medical Committee must necessarily fall back on the knowledge and experience of witnesses and of others who have prescribed or used contraceptives” (p. 2). For a discussion of the reasons for regarding the statistical evidence as unsatis-factory, see ibid., pp. 12, 59.
Observations on castrated individuals, along with the folklore regarding human sexuality, had provided the basis for many of the scientific and medical facts popularized in Victorian advice literature. These facts sometimes were questioned by commentators, but rarely were they challenged by experimental investigation. Personal experience bore out the notion that sexual energy was limited, that ejaculation was followed by debilitation. Thus sexuality was understood to be both related to and, to a certain extent, dependent upon the state of the nervous system. Many Victorian nervous disorders were explained by reference to inappropriate sexual activity, and castration was sometimes practiced to treat such conditions. Anxiety regarding sexual behavior, so prominent in the mid-nineteenth century, reinforced and perpetuated the physiological assumptions regarding the relationship between sexual activity and the general health of the individual. As birth control methods, coitus reservatus and coitus interruptus had been considered damaging to the nervous system of the male. Consequently, the practice of family limitation had been thought to be detrilead to overindulgence and/or promiscuity, with the attendant social evils of prostitution and homosexuality (see note 11 for a full bibliography). A radical change in interpretation is evidenced in the report of the Medical Committee discussed here. Birth control and sexual expression were now presumed to be essential to the stability of the family.
Medical Aspects, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., pp. 9–10.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 7.
See reports of Gertrude Struges of New York (ibid., pp. 47–65) and Robert L. Dickinson (ibid., pp. 35–46), both of whom discuss the work of the Committee on Maternal Health. Dickinson noted that physicians had to decide whether or not to investigate contraception: “The medical profession is faced with ... a world-wide problem presenting new conditions which the doctor has helped to create. He has taken his part in fostering increase in population through successful contest with preventable disease and infantile mortality and by bringing people up to marriageable age” (p. 35).
For a full discussion see Borell, “Biologists and Birth Control Research.”
Ibid. In his report to the Medical Committee, Dickinson had noted: “In March 1923, the Committee on Maternal Health began work on questions of human fertility and sterility. It was self-constituted, as no scientific organization could be found that was willing to include a study of birth control.” (Medical Aspects, p. 37). For this reason advocates had to recruit scientists to undertake the work. I discuss the rationale developed to support these studies in “Biologists and Birth Control Research.”
Marshall became University Lecturer in Agricultural Physiology in 1908 and Reader in 1919.
F. H. A. Marshall, An Introduction to Sexual Physiology for Biological, Medical, and Agricultural Students (London: Longmans, Green, 1925), p. v. For more extensive accounts of sexual physiology, Marshall referred readers to the second edition of his Physiology of Reproduction (1922) or to Alexander Lipschutz's Internal Secretions of the Sex Glands: The Problem of the “Puberty Gland” (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1924), for which he had written an introduction. Lipschutz, whose book first appeared in 1919 as Die Pubertätsdrüse und ihre Wirkungen, was professor of physiology at Dorpat University.
“Precis of Evidence by F. H. A. Marshall, Sc.D., F.R.S. Evidence relating to the viability of the spermatozoon and the unfertilized ovum in the female generative tract,” in Medical Aspects, pp. 24–34. Studies of chemical contraceptives were undertaken first at Oxford and then at Edinburgh, shortly after this report was published. John R. Baker's work at Oxford was sponsored by the Birth Control Investigation Committee, a group established in Britain in 1927. Cecil Voge's work at Edinburgh was sponsored from 1929 on by the (American) Committee on Maternal Health and funded by the Bureau of Social Hygiene. Cf. James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 242–243. Reed discusses the resistance of American scientists to evaluation of the contraceptives then available. I examine this work in “Biologists and Birth Control Research.”
“Mr. T. A. Webster, M.A., Medical Aspects, pp. 100–106.
Medical Aspects, p. 47.
Ibid., pp. 49–50.
Money was raised by a lay woman, Gertrude Pinchot, treassurer of the committee, and Dr. Dickinson, former president of the American Gynecological Society (ibid., p. 57). Major sources of American support were the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Research Council's Committee for Research in the Problems of Sex. Support in Britain derived from the Eugenics Society. See my discussion in “Biologists and Birth Control Research.” Parkes has commented on subsequent British funding: “During the late 1920s the M.R.C. [Medical Research Council] received an increasing number of applications for grants in support of work on the newly discovered hormones. Early in 1930, therefore, the Council set up a Committee on Sex Hormones with Marshall in the Chair and Crew, Dodds, Dudley and Korenchevsky as members.” Parkes himself served as secretary. The committee lasted for four years, when it was followed by the council's Therapeutic Trials Committee. Parkes notes that the most important work of these committees “was to confer respectability on what for long, in this country [Britain], has been regarded as a rather shady subject.” Cf. Parkes, “Rise of Reproductive Endocrinology,” p. xxx. Note that the Journal of Endocrinology was only founded in 1939, whereas journals devoted to endocrinology had been established in the United States and on the Continent between 1917 and 1928. Cf. Humphry Davy Rolleston, The Endocrine Organs in Health and Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 1.
Medical Aspects, pp. 57–58.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid.
For an interesting analysis of these problems from the point of view of intellectual history, see Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex: Hayelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Robinson's study, while provocative, does not consider the technical difficulties inherent in the scientific study of sex. For this reason I have attempted to illuminate, some of the technical problems that arose from recognition of the existence of potent chemicals in the sex glands. These tactical issues were also emphasized in a Faculty Research Lecture by Frank Beach at the University of California, Berkeley, on February 15, 1977, entitled “Adventures in Behavioral Endocrinology, an Emerging Discipline.”
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Borell, M. Organotherapy and the emergence of reproductive endocrinology. J Hist Biol 18, 1–30 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00127955
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00127955