Quotes from the Past: the Trotula and Pregnancy

Sep 06, 2024

Birth control is nothing new, although birth control that actually works well is certainly modern. 12th century women tried their own methods of birth control. With the way things are headed, Americans may want to take note of these. The Trotula’s “Book on the Conditions of Women” has quite a few suggestions.

“If a woman does not wish to conceive, let her carry against her nude flesh the womb of a goat which has never had offspring.”

“In another fashion, take a male weasel and let its testicles be removed and let it be released alive. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bosom and let her tie them in goose skin or in another skin, and she will not conceive.”

Interestingly enough, women today are advised to stay away from animals that are giving birth since infectious organisms may be present in the birth fluid, particularity in sheep, cattle and goats. Also, the Indigenous women of Turkana County in Kenya still use goat oil as a birth control. Scientists’ guess as to how they find any success with the oil is that possibly bacteria grows on the oil causing it to destroy the fallopian tubes when ingested. Perhaps bacteria did the same with the goat wombs and weasel testicles.

I checked to see what modern conservative men would think of bringing back the Trotula’s methods. The results are mixed.

The Trotula had some other gems of reproductive wisdom. My favorite being that a pregnant women must have absolutely anything to eat that she desires or she will miscarry. Pregnancy cravings 12th century style. “Note that when a woman is in the beginning of her pregnancy, care ought to be taken that nothing is named in front of her which she is not able to have, because if she sets her mind on it and it is not given to her, this occasions miscarriage. If, however, she desires clay or chalk or coals, let beans cooked with sugar be given to her.” The latter of course being a reference to the disorder of pica, a nutritional deficit some pregnant people today still struggle with.

If a woman found herself unable to get pregnant, she could clear her name of being infertile if she took “two pots and in each one place wheat bran and put some of the man’s urine in one of them with the bran, and in the other some urine of the woman, and let the pots sit for nine or ten days. If the infertility is the fault of the woman, you will find many worms in her pot and the bran will stink.” (If it’s the man’s fault the same thing will happen in his pot.)

Choosing whether the child was a male or female was easy. If a woman wanted a male, her husband should “take the womb and the vagina of a hare” and turn it into a powder to mix “with wine and drink it.” The woman, of course, does not drink the hare vagina wine. She drinks hare testicle wine.

There was even a recipe for celibate women and widows who couldn’t have sex. (It was thought that women needed to have sex to stay healthy. If she didn’t she may become gravely ill.) To lessen their desire, and keep them healthy, they could place “cotton and musk or pennyroyal oil” and put it in the vagina as a pessary. Pennyroyal oil has a numbing quality so I suppose when she is aching for man, numbing her vagina would lessen her thoughts of that.

There were several recipes aiding women to appear as if they were virgins. She could “take the whites of eggs and mix them with water in which pennyroyal and hot herbs of this kind have been cooked” and “place it in the vagina two or three times a day.”

Alternatively, the night before she is married “let her place leeches in the vagina (but take care that they do not go in too far) so that blood comes out and is converted into a little clot. And thus the man will be deceived by the effusion of blood.”

Please, don’t try this at home. 😉

Sources:

The Trotula (Book on the Conditions of Women)

Goat Cream: The Only Contraceptive We Know

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