making a Chinese toyshop of it

The development of the contraceptive pill changed women’s lives. Prior to that, things were pretty hit and miss, with IUDs generally only being available to married women and condoms having a high fail rate.

“In light of the growing number of available contraceptives such as pessaries and suppositories, the New York Medical Journal ran a parody entitled “A Raid on the Uterus“.” The article detailed 123 different varieties of pessaries on the market, from a simple plug to a “patent threshing machine, which can be worn with the largest hoops”. This proliferation far outweighed the need, the author insisted. “I do think that this filling the vagina with such traps, making a Chinese toy shop of it, is outrageous.”

According to this book there was also the Venus Apparatus, a small rubber ball filled with Venus Powder which was connected to a larger ball by tubing. The smaller ball was inserted into the vagina and at the moment of ejaculation the woman squeezed the larger ball which expelled the Venus Powder within.

In the late 19th century, German women favoured suppositories with grandiose names; The Sib-torpedo, Spermathanaton, Pudi de Paris, and Dr Hutler’s Vaginal Insufflator For the Malthusian.

As recently as last month, this site was promoting ‘natural’ methods of contraception involving the ingestion of peppers, hibiscus flowers and Indian gooseberries. Or you could place a piece of rock salt in your vagina for 100 seconds. I think I’d rather abstain…..

it’s up and ready to enter into marriage

Professor Karl August Weinhold*** was a German physician with a few strange ideas. I discovered this by reading Panati’s Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody which you can probably find in your local library. Or you could read a translated wikipedia page about him which is even more fun…..

Weinhold recommended the following as a means to prevent overpopulation:

“I propose, therefore, as a general and urgent measure, a kind of indissoluble infibulation with soldered joints and metallic sealing before, which is not different from what can only be opened by force, quite capable of preventing the act of procreation until the entry into marriage. This kind of indissoluble infibulation talking to me on several individuals who hold placed by masturbation into an almost incurable nerve weakness, which treffliebsten services provided. You go from being fourteen years old, it’s up and ready to enter into marriage applied to such individuals who possess demonstrable not so much wealth to feed the creatures created out of wedlock educate. They will remain where all his life, which never come to the logo, to be able to support a family and maintain.

The surgery itself is quite easy and almost painless, as does the Verlötnng and metallic seals, the latter of my invention, the foreskin is in fact preferred, and between a pair of perforated metal plates gently squeezed, so that the pierced a hollow needle in which a wire is five inches long, can hardly be felt. Is pulled through the wire, it is bent so that it is not obvious which parts can be pressed, and both front Eiidspitzen be approached and fused together by means of a soldering iron kleineu. As soon as the soldered spot, which gets the size of a lentil, is cold, is pressed by an oppositional attitude of a solid body, a small metal die and this taken into custody.

It is thus quite impossible to open the infibulation and close without a stamp again secretly, without that there should not be detected at the next examination. The control of the legal and illegal opening of that is due to a medical-legal authority. The secret and violent opening, which should be made by individuals 14 to 17 years, will be punished without respect of persons with rods.

Those, however, which of 18 to 24 Years of life represented as taking place with the rat race, what would be best suited to take the surplus from the sexual voluptuous power tools in the work-shy arms and legs

*** As well as being in favour of infibulating and male chastity belts as a way of population control, he was also one of several doctors who attempted to galvanise the dead back to life using electricity

baby claus 9

Canadian Charles Millar died in 1928, leaving behind an unusual will

Charles Chaplin NOT Charles Millar

Millar left lucrative shares in the Ontario Jockey Club to men who were strong opponents of gambling. He gave equal shares in a vacation home to three fellow lawyers who intensely disliked each other. He gave shares of the O’Keefe Brewery Company to every Protestant minister and every Orange Lodge in Ontario, all strong supporters of prohibition. The fact that the company was owned by Catholics only added to the discomfort felt by the “heirs”.

However, it was Clause 9 of the will that drew the most interest. By it, Millar left the remainder of his money to the Toronto woman who could produce the most children, certified by registrations under the Vital Statistics Act, in the ten year period following the date of his death.

image of Keys quadruplets going to visit Dionne quadruplets found here

Contestants, some of whom became close friends, were quickly identified and became overnight celebrities. Staid Ontario papers began covering topics often verboten in the past – birth control, abortion, illegitimate children, and divorce. The legal system became involved.

On October 31, 1936, the contest officially ended in a tie. Four women, Anna Katherine Smith, Kathleen Ellen Nagle, Lucy Alice Timleck, and Isabel Mary Macclean, had nine children each. They were each awarded $125,000 (US $1,500,000 today). Two other women would have also tied but were eliminated. Pauline Clarke had nine children but admitted that one was by a man not her husband. Lillian Kenney had actually had twelve babies, but several had died and she was unable to prove that they were not stillborn. As a consolation prize, each was given $12,500.

The image above is of The Fultz sisters, the first black quadruplets born in the USA. You can read their story here. The babies were delivered by Dr Fred Klenner, the father of Fritz Klenner

Years later, Klenner would gain fame as an early advocate of massive vitamin-C therapy, and then infamy as the father of Fritz Klenner, the delusional, kissing-cousin survivalist behind the made-for-TV murder-suicides of 1985.