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In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel For Family Planning

In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel For Family Planning
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March 8, 1994, Section C, Page 1Buy Reprints
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BACK in the first century B.C., the Roman poet Catullus suggested to his lover Lesbia that they might exchange kisses numbering "as many as there are grains of sand on Cyrene's silphium shores."

Romantic as the reference to the ancient Greek city on the coast of North Africa was, it also apparently contained a practical note. Silphium, now extinct, was a plant used for birth control, says Dr. John M. Riddle, a historian at North Carolina State University, in a provocative article in the March/April issue of Archeology magazine.

A kind of "giant fennel," whose juice apparently was used as a contraceptive, silphium was but one of many plants that were used through the ancient world to prevent pregnancies and induce abortions, Dr. Riddle reports. And, he contends, these medicines were not just black magic or mumbo jumbo. Modern scientific studies, he says, reveal that a good proportion of them probably worked.

Other experts say they are not entirely convinced that the old methods were potent, or even in widespread use, but they concede that Dr. Riddle's hypothesis is tantalizing.

Historians have long known that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans purposely limited the sizes of their populations. Women in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome married shortly after they were physically able to become pregnant and in theory spent 20 to 30 years of their lives vulnerable to pregnancy after pregnancy. Yet, Dr. Riddle said in an interview, "we know that for long periods they did not have enough children for the population to increase and, in fact, there were periods when the population decreased."

High infant mortality rates and battlefield deaths have been offered as explanations. But Dr. Riddle pointed out that the population decreases "tend to occur in times of prosperity and stability." For example, he said, "in the Roman Empire, during the longest period of lasting peace, there was a great deal of difficulty with population decreases."

Historians have deduced that ancient populations used a variety of methods to limit populations, including infanticide, physical separation of men and women, and the encouragement of practices that would not lead to pregnancies, like anal sex and homosexuality. But Dr. Riddle said that evidence from laboratory tests of some of the plant materials indicates that the old references to contraceptives and abortifacients should be taken seriously.

"I think it's definitely an intriguing hypothesis," said Dr. Monica Green, a historian at Duke University, although she and others consider it still just a hypothesis, and that many other explanations for ancient population control have scientific validity.

Dr. Vivian Nutton, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of London, said, "Here you have something that people have on the whole forgotten." Historians had noted references to the drugs in ancient texts, but "we never really considered the effectiveness of those drugs," he went on. Although Dr. Nutton said he was not entirely convinced that the drugs were a major method of birth control, the hypothesis, he admitted, is fascinating.

Silphium belonged to the Ferula genus, whose plants contain a substance, ferujol, that in low doses is nearly 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy in rats. Dr. Riddle notes in his article, which examines the science behind some of the old nostrums, that a plant related to silphium, Ferula moschata, is used as a folk medicine today in Central Asia to induce abortions.

Another plant that the ancients used was Queen Anne's lace, or wild carrot. Hippocrates wrote that its seeds are contraceptives and that they also induce abortions. Studies with rodents indicate that Hippocrates may have been right, Dr. Riddle said. The seeds block the production of progesterone, a hormone that is necessary for a pregnancy to be established.

Queen Anne's lace is still used as a folk medicine. Some women in Appalachia drink a glass of water containing a teaspoonful of the seeds immediately after sexual intercourse, to prevent conception. And women in Rajasthan, India, chew the plant's seeds for the same reason. 'A Dose of Pennyroyal'

Another ancient contraceptive was pennyroyal, mentioned in Aristophanes's comedy "Peace," written in 421 B.C. In the play, a man is worried that his female companion might become pregnant. Hermes tells him that he need not be if he adds "a dose of pennyroyal." Pennyroyal, Dr. Riddle said, is now known to contain pulegone, a chemical that terminates pregnancies.

In Greek myth, Zeus' daughter Persephone was told not to eat anything while she was in Hades. She disobeyed and ate a pomegranate seed. For that, she was condemned to return to Hades for six months of every year, giving the earth its autumn and winter. Pomegranate seed, Dr. Riddle said, was used as a contraceptive in ancient Greece. He said that scientists in the 1930's showed that it reduces the fertility of laboratory animals.

Ancient Egyptian documents state that acacia gum prevents pregnancies if mixed with plant fibers and honey to form a pessary, a device worn in the vagina. Acacia gum is a spermicide, Dr. Riddle noted. Modern studies have shown that rats fed the plant's leaves or seeds did not become pregnant.

Although many of the ancient remedies have not been tested by modern methods, Dr. Riddle said he was convinced that many were effective. "Women had control over their reproduction," Dr. Riddle said. "It was their decision." If a woman took a contraceptive and it did not work, "she'd move on" and take an abortifacient, Dr. Riddle said. And if that did not work, she would try another. Co-Author Is Uncertain

Others are not so sure. Dr. J. Worth Estes, a professor of pharmacology and a historian of science at the Boston University School of Medicine, was asked by Dr. Riddle to help evaluate the science behind the ancient medicines. He and Dr. Josiah C. Russell, a professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of New Mexico, are co-authors with Dr. Riddle of the Archeology paper, but do not share all Dr. Riddle's conclusions.

"We agreed to disagree," Dr. Estes said. "Do I believe in these things? There are the observations and they are tantalizing."

But, he added, "I sit here as a professor of pharmacology teaching about modern drugs to medical students." When we ask about the effectiveness of folk medicines, "we should apply the same standards," he said.

Dr. Estes said he studied medicines used in the 18th century to cure a variety of illnesses and found that most are ineffective. He said that he wondered why patients kept using medicines that did not work and that he reasoned that in most cases, people get better on their own no matter what they take, if they are healthy to begin with.

The same general philosophy guides his skepticism about the contraceptives and abortifacients used in ancient times. Most acts of intercourse do not lead to pregnancies, so without very careful studies, it can be hard to determine whether a substance prevented a pregnancy or whether there never would have been a pregnancy anyway. Likewise, many pregnancies naturally end in miscarriages, so it can be hard to tell whether a plant was responsible for a particular miscarriage. Other Factors to Consider

Other substances, Dr. Estes said, may be effective as contraceptives or abortifacients but they are toxic to other body tissues. "There are a lot of substances, like pennyroyal, that are well known and used by poor women in parts of Kentucky and other states," Dr. Estes said. "It helps cause abortions, but the problem is, it can knock out the liver."

Dr. Nutton suggested other limits on population growth. People often were malnourished, he pointed out, which limited fertility. They also are known to have used pessaries of all sorts. And sometimes, as in Sparta, men and women were physically separated. "The men were herded into barracks while the women were 20 miles away," Dr. Nutton said. And he said Sparta suffered severe population declines.

Many historians contend that the most persistent way that family size was limited was with infanticide. "There are texts that talk about infanticide as normal," as a perfectly unremarkable way to limit family size, Dr. Nutton said.

Dr. Russell, the co-author, pointed to another statistic, which supports the infanticide hypothesis. In the ancient world, and up until the time that Europe was ravaged by plague and tuberculosis around the first century A.D., the number of men in the population exceeded the number of women.

"Plants didn't do that, of course," he said. "Population control was control over the number of women in the population."

Dr. Green, the Duke historian, said she questioned the assumption that because information about contraceptives and abortofacients was written in ancient texts, women knew about them. In her own specialty, gynecological texts from the medieval period, there is reason to believe that men did not always tell women what they knew, she said.

For example, she has analyzed texts translated from Latin into the vernacular and addressed to women. "In every case, it suppresses the contraceptive information," she said, adding that this "tells me a lot -- that women were not being trusted."

The fact is, "we don't know what was available to women," Dr. Green said. "Women don't get documented. Women's opinions don't get documented. And women's practices don't get documented."

But she added that even if no one can ever prove it, she would not be surprised if women in ancient times knew how to control their fertility.

"It certainly makes sense to me," she said. "These people were not idiots. They did not have anything like the modern means of testing chemicals, but they could watch what happens over the years and over the generations."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel For Family Planning. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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