According to the History Channel’s The History of Sex, the ancient Romans ate a specific plant for birth control purposes. It was described as being enormously effective, to the extent that it was extinct by the fall of the empire. I’m sure a quick Web search would tell me the story of a worthless little herb, but I’d like to hear you weigh in on this long-lost miracle drug. –Brett, Memphis
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About that herb. Long before hippies thought hemp could solve all the world’s problems, Romans used an alleged wonder plant of the carrot and parsley family called silphium. It was a sort of giant fennel that grew wild near Cyrene, an ancient coastal city in North Africa. Silphium had many uses–perfume from its flowers, food from its stalk, and medicine from its juice (or resin) and roots. The Romans didn’t discover the plant’s properties–there’s evidence the Greeks and Egyptians used it as a contraceptive as early as the seventh century BC on the advice of physicians, who recommended a monthly dose of a lump of resin the size of a chickpea mixed with water. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described use of the resin (called laser or laserpicium) “with soft wool as a pessary to promote the menstrual discharge.” Menstrual discharge, of course, means no pregnancy. One physician in the second century AD named Soranus claimed a special recipe using silphium had been used to terminate pregnancies. In Contraception and Abortion From the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992), medical historian John Riddle claims that modern studies show the recipe and others like it would work.
Demographic studies suggest that the Roman world should have had a population explosion due to a low disease rate, plentiful food, and relatively few civilian war deaths. Some have seized on the fact that it didn’t as evidence that people of the era had access to effective birth control. Although silphium is no longer around, modern studies of the closely related plant asafetida show a 50 percent success rate in preventing implantation of fertilized eggs in rats, and it’s nearly 100 percent effective when fed to them within three days of mating. Likewise, studies of wild carrot have shown that it blocks production of progesterone, necessary for the uterus lining to maintain the fetus. The seeds of Queen Anne’s lace are still used as a birth control method today. Plausible as all this sounds, one can’t help raising a few objections, the most obvious being that positing a successful, society-wide planned-parenthood program that endured for centuries on the basis of a few rat experiments is a mighty long leap.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
