How did prostitutes avoid pregnancy before the invention of birth control and condoms?
Birth control of one kind or another has always been around. The ancient Egyptians for instance advised plugging the vagina with gum, a mixture of honey and sodium carbonate, or a paste of crocodile dung mixed with sour milk. Honey or gum would certainly have reduced the mobility of the sperm. Even crocodile dung would have had absorbent qualities, though elephant dung would have been better as it is more acidic. An Egyptain document called the Ebers Papyrus, which dates from about 1525 BC, gvies the following method "To make a woman not become pregnant for one year, two years, or three years, acacia leaves are gound find with honey, lint is moistened therewith and placed in her vulva." Such tampons would have functioned as contraceptives, since acacia gum contains lactic acid, a highly effective spermicide. Greek and Roman medical writers give a variety of different recipes for contraception. In the fourth century BC, the philosopher Aristotle noted that women of his time who did not wish to conceive "anoint that part of the womb on which the seed falls with oil of cedar, ointment of lead, or frakinsense commingled with olive oil." The application of oil, and particularly olive oil, makes perfect sense, the motility of sperm would have been reduced considerably. In the Western world this contraceptive propertyof olive oil was rediscovered by Marie Stopes, a modern pioneer of contraception who made a study of the contraceptive properties of olive oil, apllied to the vagina. In 1938 she published the results of a series of controlled tests, reporting a zero failure rate for this method. In Roman times, the physicians Dioscorides (c AD 40-80) and Galen (AD 129-199) listed around a dozen plants that acted as oral contraceptives. These included asfetida, juniper, pennyroyal, "squriting cucumber" , and wild carrot. The effectiveness of these herbal potions has been amply confirmed bymedical research within the last thirty years. Sonarus of Ephesus, in the first century AD, particularly favoured the use of vaginal plugs of wool annointed with various substances, such as olive oil, cedar oil, honey, cedr resin, or the juice of the balsam tree. The use of sticky substances such as olive oil would, as we have seen, have been highly effective.