You’re Having A Laugh – Part Twelve
The pregnancy without intercourse hoax, 1750
Ladies, imagine being able to become pregnant without the necessity of having some sweaty, hairy male astride you or, at least, a test tube of his sperm inserted into him. Leaving aside the inherent pleasures to be gained from sexual congress, for some there might be something quite appealing about conceiving without the efforts of a male partner.
Living conditions “enjoyed” by our forefathers were squalid, fetid and generally unhealthy. In the absence of any specialist knowledge of microbiology and epidemiology, it was popularly held, even by what passed for the scientific community, that miasma, a noxious form of bad air, was the cause of many of the horror diseases such as cholera, chlamydia and the plague, to which the populace were only all to prone. It was only as late as the 1880s that scientists realised that diseases were caused by the transmission of germs.
There were, of course, some advances in scientific knowledge and what proved to be a spur to the improvement of the understanding of biology was the development of the microscope, allowing the inquisitive scientist to overcome the constraints imposed on them by the effectiveness of their natural eyesight. A particular breakthrough was the discovery of seminal animalicules or what we would term as sperm in animal semen, a discovery attributed by the Royal Society of London to the Dutchman, Anton Leeuwenhoek and his assistant Johan Ham, in 1677, although Nicolaas Hartsoeker disputed their claim. This discovery spawned spermist preformationism, a theory that held that the human offspring developed from a fully-formed embryo in the head of the sperm cell.
In 1750 the Royal Society received a curious letter, penned by someone called Abraham Johnson, entitled Lucina sine concubita, which loosely translates to pregnancy without intercourse. The correspondent claimed that he was endowed with a “wonderful, cylindrical, catoptrical, rotundo-concavo-convex machine” through which he had observed floating animalcula floating in the air. Having isolated them and examined them under a microscope, Johnson found them to be exact replicas of men and women.
The upshot of this remarkable discovery, claimed Johnson, was that women could become pregnant without the assistance of men and that women, who had become pregnant in circumstances where hitherto they had been unable (or unwilling) to give a rational explanation, had the perfect get out. It must have been these animalcula floating in the air.
To prove his theory, Johnson proposed a dramatic solution. He recommended that a Royal edict be passed banning copulation for one year. The withholding of sexual favours has been a powerful weapon that women have deployed against men, dating back to at least the times of the ancient Greek.s The plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata revolves around a sex strike by the women of Athens, the only way they would be able to get their menfolk to sue for peace with the Spartans. If the edict was implemented and there were still pregnancies and birth, Johnson argued, then it must be down to the animalcula he had discovered.
I can imagine that many a peruke was scratched in the hallowed sanctum of the Royal Society as this bizarre letter was passed around the great and the good of the scientific community. But of course it was all an elaborate hoax, aimed at satirising the prevailing theory of spermist preformationism.
But who perpetrated it?
The finger of suspicion was pointed at someone we have met before, Sir John Hill, the rather disputatious purveyor of the Pectoral Balsam of Honey, which didn’t contain much honey. He was pissed off with the Royal Society who had the audacity to turn down his application for membership.
At least he got his own back with some style.
