The Faber Book of Science (24 page)
Read The Faber Book of Science Online
Authors: John Carey
Birth control is not new. The methods used by the ancient Greeks – abstinence, abortion, withdrawal and extended breastfeeding – remained the commonest forms of fertility-limitation until the arrival of the oral
contraceptive
and the IUD in the 1960s. Condoms (made of linen, animal bladders, or fine skins) were in use from the late sixteenth century. But since they were regarded mainly as a safeguard against venereal disease (and were available in brothels in several European capitals by the end of the eighteenth century), they remained disreputable.
Public defence of birth control is first found in late-eighteenth century France. In the early nineteenth century it drew strongly on the theories of Malthus (see p. 54). It was not, at first, linked with women’s rights but with restriction of the irresponsible fertility of the poor. The introduction of a relatively reliable ‘scientific’ female contraceptive may have helped to change this emphasis during the later nineteenth century. By 1918 Marie Stopes was arguing, in her bestseller
Married
Love,
that the wife had as much right to sexual pleasure as her husband, and she opened the first English birth control clinic in London’s Holloway Road in March 1921.
This extract is from Angus McLaren’s
History
of
Contraception
(1990).
The invention of the diaphragm did represent a significant innovation in fertility control. Nineteenth-century doctors popularized the use of pessaries to correct prolapsed uteruses; it was a short step to employ them as a barrier method of birth control. Such a device was presumably what Dr Edward B. Foote meant when referring to an Indian-rubber ‘womb veil’. The German physician W. P. J. Mensinga provided a clearer account of his diaphragm in 1882; a soft rubber shield which the woman inserted into the vagina to block entry to the uterus. Mensinga’s explicit intent was to protect unhealthy women from undesired pregnancies. The diaphragm was, when accompanied by douching, an effective female contraceptive; unfortunately its expense and the fact that it had to be fitted by a physician long restricted its use to a middle-class clientele.
Commercial houses began at the turn of the century to develop acidic powders and jellies to block and kill sperm. Easier to use was the soluble quinine pessary or suppository developed by the Rendell company in England in the 1880s and popularized by Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt. Similar home-made products which countered
conception
with both a barrier and a spermicide were soon being made from cocoa butter or glycerine by innovative housewives across Europe and North America.
Diaphragms and pessaries to be fully effective had to be followed by douching. Douching after intercourse with a vaginal syringe to destroy ‘the fecundating property of the sperm by chemical agents’ was recommended by the Massachusetts doctor Charles Knowlton in his
Fruits
of
Philosophy,
published in 1832. Knowlton was prosecuted for obscenity, but his douching advice was repeated by others, such as Frederick Hollick in 1850 in his
Marriage
Guide.
Simple cold water was suggested by some; Knowlton stressed the need to add a restringent or acidic agent such as alum, various sulphates or vinegar. Douches, like diaphragms, were regarded as providing a woman with contraceptive independence. By mid-century they were readily
available
in pharmacies and drug stores and sold via respectable mail-order catalogues, purportedly for purposes of hygiene. They were, for this reason, promoted by the German Health Insurance Programme and provided free to members of local Funds. Douching did entail expenses and required both a privacy and a water supply that was not available to many working-class couples. Perhaps this was just as well, since simply douching after intercourse was in fact less effective than coitus interruptus.
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, contraceptives and abortifacients were advertised in newspapers and magazines, sold in barber shops, rubber good stores and pharmacies, and brought to villages by itinerant pedlars and to working-class neighbourhoods by door-to-door hucksters. Irish doctors were astonished at the display by London chemists of ‘antigestatory appliances’ and ‘orchitological literature’.
Source: Angus McLaren,
A
History
of
Contraception:
From
Antiquity
to
the
Present
Day,
Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Several early naturalists observed instances of a female praying mantis eating the male during copulation. L. O. Howard sent the following account to the American magazine
Science
in 1886.
A few days since, I brought a male of
Mantis
carolina
to a friend who had been keeping a solitary female as a pet. Placing them in the same jar, the male, in alarm, endeavored to escape. In a few minutes the female succeeded in grasping him. She first bit off his left front tarsus, and consumed the tibia and femur. Next she gnawed out his left eye. At this the male seemed to realize his proximity to one of the opposite sex, and began to make vain endeavors to mate. The female next ate up his right front leg, and then entirely decapitated him, devouring his head and gnawing into his thorax. Not until she had eaten all of his thorax except about three millimetres, did she stop to rest. All this while the male had continued his vain attempts to obtain entrance at the valvules, and he now succeeded, as she voluntarily spread the parts open, and union took place. She remained quiet for four hours, and the remnant of the male gave occasional signs of life by a movement of one of his remaining tarsi for three hours. The next morning she had entirely rid herself of her spouse, and nothing but his wings remained.
The female was apparently full-fed when the male was placed with her, and had always been plentifully supplied with food.
The extraordinary vitality of the species which permits a fragment of the male to perform the act of impregnation is necessary on account of the rapacity of the female, and it seems to be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive from the embraces of his partner.
In the
Biological
Bulletin
for October 1935, a later researcher, K. D. Roeder, demonstrated that removal of the male praying mantis’s head actually improved its sexual performance. This, he showed, was because the subesophageal ganglion (near the head) normally inhibits the copulatory
movement of the abdomen. Once the subesophageal ganglion has been removed, by decapitating the insect, it will copulate with almost anything.
In his experiment, Roeder beheaded eighteen male mantises. Decapitation, he reported, is followed by a preliminary stage of shock, lasting for about ten minutes, after which the insects begin vigorous copulatory movements:
If they encounter any rounded object, such as a pencil or the observer’s finger, it is immediately grasped by the forelegs, while the other legs steady the body. Violent attempts are made to copulate with the object.
Decapitating females, Roeder found, does not have such dramatic results, though it does cause some muscular activity in the abdomen:
A decapitated female will readily accept a male, decapitated or otherwise, and actual copula results sooner than when both insects are intact. The pair remain together for about four hours.
Roeder illustrated his article with a photograph of a headless male mantis copulating with a headless female.
Sources:
Science,
New York: The Science Co., 1886.
The
Biological
Bulletin,
October 1935, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory, printed and issued by Lancaster Press Inc., Prince and Lemon Sts, Lancaster, Pa.
William James (1842–1910), elder brother of the novelist Henry James, was a pioneer psychologist, and founder of the first US psychological laboratory. In his
Principles
of
Psychology
(1890) he coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’ (later used to describe the technique of writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) to characterize the chaotic flow of human mental activity. As a philosopher, he was one of the founders of Pragmatism, inventing the term ‘neutral monism’ for the theory that the ultimate constituents of reality are individual momentary experiences. In
A
Pluralistic
Universe
(1909) he suggests that the substance of reality (or ‘all-form’) may never get totally collected, and that ‘a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is as acceptable as the all-form’. This extract from the
Principles,
positing the innumerable possible worlds consequent on such a view, anticipates the multiple worlds of quantum theory (see p. 278).
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere
matter
to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world
we
feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract
them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish or crab!
Source: William James,
The
Principles
of
Psychology,
London, Macmillan, 1890.
On the evening of Friday 8 November 1895, the Professor of Physics at the University of Würzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845–1923) was working late in his laboratory, after everyone else had gone home. He was preparing to carry out some experiments with an induction coil connected to the electrodes of a partially evacuated glass tube.
It had been known since 1858 that when electricity was discharged through the air or other gases in such tubes, the glass became phosphorescent. The ‘cathode rays’ causing this had been fancifully described by Sir William Crookes in 1878 as ‘a stream of molecules in flight’. It was also known that if the tube had a thin metal-foil ‘window’ in it, the cathode rays would penetrate this and cause fluorescence a few centimetres beyond the tube. Roentgen thought cathode rays might be detectable outside the tube even when there was no metal-foil window. As a first step in investigating this he covered the entire tube in black cardboard, and drew the curtains to darken the room. To test that his cardboard shield would not let light through, he then turned on the high-voltage coil and passed a current through the tube.
What happened next is described by Roentgen’s student Charles
Nootnangle
of Minneapolis, who had it from Roentgen himself a few days later:
By chance he happened to note that a little piece of paper lying on his work table was sparkling as though a single ray of bright sunshine had fallen upon it lying in the darkness. At first he thought it was merely the reflection from the electric spark, but the reflection was too bright to allow that explanation. Finally he picked up the piece of paper and, examining it, found that the reflected light was given by a letter A which had been written on the paper with a platinocyanide [fluorescent] solution.
It was at once clear to Roentgen that the piece of chemically-treated paper could not have been made to fluoresce by cathode rays, since it was several feet away from the tube. Some other rays must be responsible – rays that were able to pass through the cardboard shield round the tube, and travel invisibly
through the air. Since he had no idea what these rays were, Roentgen called them X-rays, and he began experimenting to see what other substances they would pass through. On 28 December 1895 he presented his ‘Preliminary Communication’, entitled
On
a
new
Kind
of
Rays,
to the President of the Würzburg Physical and Medical Society.
The most striking feature of this phenomenon is the fact that an active agent here passes through a black cardboard envelope, which is opaque to the visible and the ultra-violet rays of the sun or of the electric arc; an agent, too, which has the power of producing active fluorescence. Hence we may first investigate the question whether other bodies also possess this property.
We soon discover that all bodies are transparent to this agent, though in very different degrees. I proceed to give a few examples: Paper is very transparent; behind a bound book of about one thousand pages I saw the fluorescent screen light up brightly, the printers’ ink offering scarcely a notable hindrance. In the same way the fluorescence appeared behind a double pack of cards; a single card held between the apparatus and the screen being almost unnoticeable to the eye. A single sheet of tin-foil is also scarcely perceptible; it is only after several layers have been placed over one another that their shadow is distinctly seen on the screen. Thick blocks of wood are also transparent, pine boards two or three centimetres thick absorbing only slightly. A plate of aluminium about fifteen millimetres thick, though it enfeebled the action seriously, did not cause the fluorescence to disappear entirely. Sheets of hard rubber several centimetres thick still permit the rays to pass through them. (For brevity’s sake I shall use the expression ‘rays’; and to distinguish them from others of this name I shall call them ‘X-rays’.) Glass plates of equal thickness behave quite differently, according as they contain lead (flint-glass) or not; the former are much less transparent than the latter. If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself … Lead of a thickness of 1.5 millimetres is practically opaque …
I have observed, and in part photographed, many shadow-pictures of this kind, the production of which has a particular charm. I possess, for instance, photographs of the shadow of the profile of a door which separates the rooms in which, on one side, the discharge-apparatus was placed, on the other the photographic plate; the shadow of the
bones of the hand; the shadow of a covered wire wrapped on a wooden spool; of a set of weights enclosed in a box; of a galvanometer in which the magnetic needle is entirely enclosed by metal; of a piece of metal whose lack of homogeneity becomes noticeable by means of the X-rays, etc. I have obtained a most beautiful photographic shadow-picture of the double barrels of a hunting-rifle with cartridges in place, in which all the details of the cartridges, the internal faults of the damask barrels, etc., could be seen most distinctly and sharply.
Roentgen’s discovery was publicized in the world’s press, and caused great excitement. A reporter, H. J. W. Dam, interviewed Roentgen in his laboratory and described what ensued for readers of
McClure’s
Magazine
(New York and London) in April 1896.
In addition to his own language he speaks French well and English scientifically, which is different from speaking it popularly. These three tongues being more or less within the equipment of his visitor, the conversation proceeded on an international or polyglot basis, so to speak, varying at necessity’s demand.
‘Now then,’ he said smiling and with some impatience, when some personal questions at which he chafed were over, ‘you have come to see the invisible rays.’
‘Is the invisible visible?’
‘Not to the eye, but its results are. Come in here.’
He led the way to a square room and indicated the induction coil with which his researches were made, an ordinary Ruhmkorff coil with a spark of from 4 to 6 in., charged by a current of twenty amperes. Two wires led from the coil through an open door into a smaller room on the right. In this room was a small table carrying a Crookes’ tube connected with the coil. The most striking object in the room, however, was a huge and mysterious tin [actually zinc and lead] box about 7 ft. high and 4 ft. square. It stood on end like a huge packing case, its side being perhaps 5 in. from the Crookes’ tube.
The professor explained the mystery of the tin box, to the effect that it was a device of his own for obtaining a portable dark room. When he began his investigations he used the whole room as was shown by the heavy blinds and curtains so arranged as to exclude the entrance of all interfering light from the windows. In the side of the tin box at the point immediately against the tube was a circular sheet of aluminium
1 mm. in thickness, and perhaps 18 in. diameter, soldered to the surrounding tin. To study his rays the professor had only to turn on the current, enter the box, close the door, and in perfect darkness inspect only such light or light effects as he had a right to consider his own, hiding his light, in fact, not under the Biblical bushel but in a more commodious box.
‘Step inside,’ said he, opening the door which was on the side of the box farthest from the tube. I immediately did so, not altogether certain whether my skeleton was to be photographed for general inspection or my secret thoughts held up to light on a glass plate. ‘You will find a sheet of barium paper on the shelf,’ he added, and then went away to the coil. The door was closed and the interior of the box became black darkness. The first thing I found was a wooden stool on which I resolved to sit. Then I found the shelf on the side next the tube, and then the sheet of paper prepared with barium platinocyanide. I was thus being shown the first phenomenon which attracted the discoverer’s attention and led to the discovery, namely, the passage of rays, themselves wholly invisible, whose presence was only indicated by the effect they produced on a piece of sensitized photographic paper.
A moment later, the black darkness was penetrated by the rapid snapping sound of the high-pressure current in action, and I knew that the tube outside was glowing. I held the sheet vertically on the shelf, perhaps 4 in. from the plate. There was no change, however, and nothing was visible.
‘Do you see anything?’
‘No.’
‘The tension is not high enough,’ and he proceeded to increase the pressure by operating an apparatus of mercury in long vertical tubes acted upon automatically by a weight lever which stood near the coil. In a few moments the sound of the discharge again began, and then I made my first acquaintance with the roentgen rays.
The moment the current passed, the paper began to glow. A yellowish-green light spread all over its surface in clouds, waves, and flashes. The yellow-green luminescence, all the stranger and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the visible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting, and uncanny. The metal plate seemed to
offer no appreciable resistance to the flying force, and the light was as rich and full as if nothing lay between the paper and the tube.
‘Put the book up,’ said the professor.
I felt upon the shelf, in the darkness, a heavy book, 2 in. in thickness, and placed this against the plate. It made no difference. The rays flew through the metal and the book as if neither had been there, and the waves of light, rolling cloud-like over the paper, showed no change in brightness. It was a clear, material illustration of the ease with which paper and wood are penetrated. And then I laid the book and paper down, and put my eyes against the rays. All was blackness, and I neither saw nor felt anything. The discharge was in full force, and the rays were flying through my head, and, for all I knew, through the side of the box behind me. But they were invisible and impalpable. They gave no sensation whatever. Whatever the mysterious rays may be, they are not to be seen and are to be judged only by their works.
I was loath to leave this historical tin box, but the time pressed. I thanked the professor, who was happy in the reality of his discovery, and the music of his sparks. Then I said, ‘Where did you first photograph living bones?’
‘Here,’ he said, leading the way into the room where the coil stood. He pointed to a table on which was another – the latter a small,
short-legged
wooden one, with more the shape and size of a wooden seat. It was 2 ft. square and painted coal black.
‘How did you take the first hand photograph?’
The professor went over to a shelf by the window, where lay a number of prepared glass plates, closely wrapped in black paper. He put a Crookes’ tube underneath the table, a few inches from the under side of its top. Then he laid his hand flat on the top of the table, and placed the glass plate loosely on his hand.
‘You ought to have your portrait painted in that attitude,’ I suggested.
‘No, that is nonsense,’ he said, smiling.
‘Or be photographed.’ This suggestion was made with a deeply hidden purpose.
The rays from the Röntgen eyes instantly penetrated the deeply hidden purpose. ‘Oh, no,’ said he, ‘I can’t let you make pictures of me. I am too busy.’ Clearly the professor was entirely too modest to gratify the wishes of the curious world.
The reception of the discovery by the public was not entirely favourable. Photographing the skeleton of a living person was felt to be eerie. A Professor Czermak of Graz was so appalled to see an X-ray photograph of his skull that he could not sleep. ‘He has not closed an eye since he saw his own death’s head,’ reported the
Grazer
Tageblatt.
The possibility of seeing other people’s internal organs was widely considered a threat to privacy. But enthusiasm outweighed disapproval, and many potential uses of the new technique were suggested. In Paris a Dr Baraduc claimed that he could photograph the human soul with X-rays, and presented 400 such plates at an exhibition in Munich. During 1896 the use of X-rays in medical diagnosis was rapidly explored worldwide, especially in the USA. Photographs of a human foetus, of a tubercular patient’s lungs, and of the stomach, heart and other organs were published, and a Harvard professor, W. B. Cannon, watched pearl buttons pass down the oesophagus of a dog. The harmful effects of exposure to X-rays were soon noticed. Many cases of severe skin burns and loss of hair were reported, but no one appreciated the real danger. Noting their depilatory effect one enterprising Frenchman, M. Gaudoin of Dijon, offered to use X-rays to remove unwanted hair from women’s faces, and had many clients.
Dramatic use is made of early responses to X-rays in Thomas Mann’s novel
The
Magic
Mountain
(1924), which is set in a Swiss sanatorium in the years before the First World War. A student, Hans Castorp, has come to the sanatorium to visit his cousin Joachim, a patient there. The resident physician, Hofrat Behrens, takes him to the room containing the X-ray apparatus, where Joachim is to be examined.
They heard a switch go on. A motor started up, and sang furiously higher and higher, until another switch controlled and steadied it. The floor shook with an even vibration. The little red light, at right angles to the ceiling, looked threateningly across at them. Somewhere lightning flashed. And with a milky gleam a window of light emerged from the darkness: it was the square hanging screen, before which Hofrat Behrens bestrode his stool, his legs sprawled apart with his fists supported on them, his blunt nose close to the pane, which gave him a view of a man’s interior organism.
‘Do you see it, young man?’ he asked. Hans Castorp leaned over his shoulder, but then raised his head again to look toward the spot where Joachim’s eyes were presumably gazing in the darkness, with their gentle, sad expression. ‘May I?’ he asked.