Well-known optimistic method
Most well-known contraceptive method is withdrawing of the penis from vagina so that no semen is ejaculated, so think the majority of people. The famous biblical example is to be found in Genesis XXXVIII, 8-10- "And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. And Onan knew that the seed should not be his and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord, wherefore he slew him also." These words of the Bible have been taken by the Church as a justification fact for all manner of vulgarity in the area of masturbation and contraception.
Most absurd methods
As we know, Soranus (A.D. 98-138) was a Greek physician. He studied in Alexandria and later practised in Rome under Hadrian. He found enough time to write forty books or so. In his "Gynaecology" he advises“… during sex, when the man ejaculates his sperm, a woman must hold her breath, draw her body back a little so that the semen cannot get into the womb, then immediately get up and sit down with bent knees, and in this position, provoke sneezes" (quoted by S. Green, "The Curious History".) Thus, Soranus hoped, she will keep off pregnancy.
Most abnormal methods of contraception
Many of the most strange contraceptive action date from antiquity and involve magical practices and gross superstition. In modern times we can find many funny recommendations. For example, Matthew Wondorf, in the 19 century, was not disinclined to a bit of infanticide (hardly contraceptive but at any rate a form of family planning). He noted "if the alternative were complete, I think that child should be lost in the first hour of its existence, than that a cople should spend meny years of thir life in a state of suffering and vice". In 1841 Another man which called himself “Marcus” advanced the idea of systematic infanticide. According his opinion, all following babies which were born after the third baby into a poor family should be killed during their first sleep by mixing a deadly gas with the air they were breathing Jacob Linker, in 1810, Jacob Linker supposed that couples should make love only in "vessels filled with carbonic acid or azotic gas." This on the grounds that "coition will always be unfruitful unless it be done in fresh air." Weinhold recommended the infibulation of poor men, invalids, servants, apprentices, etc. - until they found themselves ability of supporting a wife and children. Doctors and others physician suggested coitus reservatus as an effective contraceptive measure.
First contraceptives
In 1885, in El Faiyum was found a fragments of Egyptian papyri. It is the oldest medical literature which saved to us from antiquity. These documents reveal that upper class Egyptian women of the Twelfth Dynasty, about 1860 B.C., used crocodile dung as a pessary, sprinkled their vagina with honey and natron (native sesquicarbonate of soda). It seemed gum-like substance which they put in their vagina.
his method was used in various countries of whole world for some three thousand years. Probably this contraceptive way had some effect. Honey and gum would impede sperm move; and crocodile's dung, slightly alkaline, would not be much different from a spermicide carried in a sponge. The Ebers papyrus (about 1545 B.C.) contained a recommendations for the use of lint tampons soaked in juice of shefler shrubs, i.e. lactic acid.
First condom using
Hercules Saxonia remembered, in 1560, that Fallopius had created the linen condom. Also he suggested improving it by wetting it in a chemical solution several times and allowing it to dry some time in the shade. While it is supposed that Fallopius was one of the first to mention the sheath or condom it is also stressed that such a device was probably invented in many different parts of the world at different times. Historians are sure it is possible that first condoms were used in ancient Rome . There is a legend, related by Antoninus Liberalis, which used goat's bladder like a female sheath. According to the story, Minos, the King of Crete, had a problem - his semen contained serpents and scorpions which injured the women with whom he made love. Happily his wife Pasiphae was immune to the creatures, yet the union was sterile.
A preparation was detect when a goat's bladder was placed in the vagina of a second woman. Minos ejaculated his snakes into this privileged woman and then could live with Pasiphae who thereupon conceived. Also, in ancient times, such condoms have been used as decoration in spiritual ceremonials.
There is an illustration of an Egyptian wearing a sheath that hangs in clumsy fashion before him. And it has been suggested that use of the condom in ancient Egypt could well date to the XIX Dynasty (1300 B.C. to 1150 B.C.)
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