Sperm testing was by no means easy to introduce. Medical and religious objections against masturbation hampered the collection of semen. Men found it hard to accept a diagnosis that destroyed their hopes of fathering children and appeared to threaten their bodily experience of potency.
- Christina Benninghaus
In 1881 a German couple – Herr and Frau B - were trying to get pregnant with no success. They consulted Dr Levy, a gynaecologist based in Munich, for help. Levy was determined to approach the problem in a scientific manner and make a thorough investigation into the man’s fertility. Over a period of several months, Levy made 12 pre-arranged home visits to the couple to conduct a study that he knew to be fraught with “obnoxiousness”.
To determine whether the ejaculate contained living spermatozoa, Levy took mucus from the woman’s vagina and cervix shortly after the couple had had sex and while the woman was still resting in the marital bed. The microscope Levy brought with him revealed that Herr B was sterile, a condition that a tough regime of physical exercise and the faradisation (treatment with electrical currents) of his testicles would prove unable to change. After trying for years to conceive a child, Herr and Frau B were reported to be content to have done their duty by exploiting every possibility that modern medicine had to offer.
The case of Herr and Frau B, and the ordeal they underwent 130 years ago, is taken from the medical literature that forms the primary source of research by historian Dr Christina Benninghaus, who has worked at Cambridge for the past two years. At a conference this week – Con/Tested: Sperm Science, Sterility and Masculinity – she will give a snapshot of her research into the history of human reproduction in the decades around 1900 and, in particular, the emergence of medical studies of male infertility.
Con/Tested: Sperm Science, Sterility and Masculinity takes place at the Department of Sociology in Cambridge today and tomorrow (11 and 12 September, 2014). The conference is sponsored by: the Wellcome Trust; the Sociology of Health and Illness Foundation; ReproSoc, the reproductive sociology research group led by Dr Sarah Franklin; and Generation to Reproduction, a research programme led by Dr Nick Hopwood in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
Read the full story
Image: Image from a popular French guidebook for infertile couples, published in 1888
Credit: Gerard, J., Nouvelles causes de stérilité dans les deux sexes
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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