Then followed a drawing that generations of histories and textbooks have made notorious ever since, of a big-headed person curled up inside a sperm cell, hands clutching knees as if he has just been told to brace for a crash. But Hartsoeker’s cautionary “perhaps we would see” is important. He did not say that he had seen this miniature figure, but only that, some day, someone might.
FIGURE 14.2. A figure in a sperm cell, 1694.
Skeptics delighted in imagining these miniature human beings tucked inside sperm cells. One physician entertained lecture audiences with a vision of “little men and little ladies, striking about and playing in the male semen, each of them endeavoring to get first into the ovarium and from thence into the womb, so that in time they may become fine ladies and gentlemen, princes, prime ministers, lawyers, heroes.”
The spermists did their best to fend off the mockery. In 1700, a few years after Hartsoeker’s suggestion, Andry made a point of emphasizing that it would be incorrect to think of “the spermatic liquid of dogs containing little dogs, that of cocks little cocks, and that of humans little children.” This was not the all-out retreat it might seem. Andry and other spermists still held to the Russian doll model. Their point was merely that since no one had yet seen those dolls, no one knew just what form they might take.
But the most perplexing riddle of all, for spermists, was different. Why had God ordained a system that relied on millions upon millions of living, tiny animals to do the work of just one? The numbers, even if we put the question of Russian dolls to one side for a minute, were astounding. By Leeuwenhoek’s reckoning, the number of “animalcules” in a single ejaculation was on the order of hundreds of millions.
Scientists today put the figure at about 250 million, which fits neatly with Leeuwenhoek’s estimate.* Big numbers are hard to grasp, but 250 million seems absurdly big. War and Peace, for instance, contains nowhere near 250 million letters. It would take eighty copies of War and Peace to total 250 million letters. Think of the overkill if just one letter from that teetering stack of books could somehow convey Tolstoy’s entire novel.
In the 1700s, this notion of waste was an abomination. God’s designs were perfect, not ludicrously wasteful. Moreover, the notion of one winner and millions of also-rans inevitably conjured up thoughts of lotteries. Had God designed a system of conception that relied on chance? Even the suggestion was heresy.
The ovists pounced. From the correct observation that there are millions upon millions of sperm cells, they leapt to the incorrect conclusion that sperm cells cannot play a key role in conception. Here was still more proof that the spotlight belonged on the egg, not the sperm. The male does contribute something to conception, the ovists conceded, but that contribution must be semen rather than the sperm cells within it.
Worst of all for the spermists, worse than waste and chance, was mass slaughter! If the tiny animals were scaled-down human beings, how could it be that all but one of them was doomed? “With this doctrine,” one shocked writer observed in 1698, one accused “the sovereign Ruler of having carried out an infinite number of murders or created an infinite number of useless things by forming in miniature an infinite number of men destined never to see the light of day.”*
Leeuwenhoek struggled to respond. The multitude of sperm cells made sense, he argued, when you considered the size of these infinitesimal but intrepid explorers. “The womb being so large in comparison of so small a creature,” he wrote. “… There cannot be too great a number of adventurers.” He turned to his go-to example, the apple tree. It produces countless seeds, and only one or two grows into a tree. That didn’t sway many listeners. An apple seed is not a human being with a soul. Nor are the extra seeds wasted; they feed birds, squirrels, and mice. More important, the fate of apple seeds is not fixed. There is no reason that they can’t all thrive, if conditions happen to cooperate. But if the spermists had it right, God’s plan called for the extermination of every animalcule but one. That was a horrifying charge, and one not to be sidestepped by a debater’s ploys.
Other attempts at explanation fared just as poorly. Many decades after Leeuwenhoek but still struggling with the same objection, an English doctor named James Cooke suggested that perhaps the millions of superfluous sperm cells “do not absolutely die.” Instead, they might live “in an insensible or dormant state, like Swallows in Winter, lying quite still like a stopped watch.” While in this hibernating state, Cooke continued, the sperm cells float randomly through the air, like dust motes, until they happen to drift “afresh into some other male Body of the proper kind.” Back in the game again, they would “run a fresh chance for a lucky Conception,” over and over again, forever.
This was, in fact, an old idea that had long ago been briefly considered and decisively rejected, on the grounds of sheer implausibility. Cooke’s return to this played-out theory was proof of the spermists’ predicament, not evidence of one bold thinker’s ingenuity.
STAGGERING ALREADY, SPERMISTS FOUND THEMSELVES HIT BY ONE more wave of bad fortune. In the 1700s, Europe was caught up in a medical panic. The crisis arrived in 1712, crested in 1762, and retained its force deep into the 1800s. The issue was an age-old misdeed: masturbation. It had been condemned since biblical times, but with hugely varying degrees of fervor in different eras—a mortal sin, a minor vice, a silly indulgence, an insult to the divine plan (because it provided sexual pleasure without any hope of reproduction).
Most of the ire was directed at men. Attitudes toward their misbehavior changed so sharply partly because attitudes toward semen zigzagged through the ages. Never merely a bodily product, semen was a magical and quasi-divine concoction, if one listened to Aristotle and his countless followers, or literally demonic, if one heeded Aquinas or legions of theologians. Often, as befit a substance that was plainly important but poorly understood, semen was praised and damned simultaneously.
It was conventional doctrine throughout the Middle Ages, for instance, that demons gathered semen and shaped it into human form. Then, suitably disguised, they tempted the unwary into various forms of diabolic sex. (They went to so much trouble because they did not have bodies of their own.) All this was so well-known that it went almost without saying.* Theologians focused on logistical questions instead. Precisely how did demons obtain their semen—from masturbators? from noctural emissions? by disguising themselves as women, and seducing men? In any case, the seed spiller was abetting the devil’s nefarious schemes.
But not even the church’s most frenzied visions of masturbators roasting in hell had inspired a panic like the one that began in the early 1700s. The difference was that the new anti-masturbation diatribes dealt with their readers’ earthly bodies, not their eternal souls, and the prospect of drooling idiocy and painful death provoked more terror than threats about burning in everlasting flames. The scare took hold around 1712, with the publication of an anonymous pamphlet called Onania, or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences.†
The thin pamphlet, which was endlessly reprinted, consisted mainly of anguished letters supposedly from victims of the heinous sin. The sufferers described in great detail the ravages of madness, starvation, and paralysis. But all was not lost. By good fortune, the author had access to several “medicines of great efficiency” that would return even the weakest to health. Contact the publisher.
FIGURE 14.3. A habitual masturbator, as depicted in an 1847 medical text.
Decade after decade, medical writers barraged the reading public with horror stories along similar lines. “Every seminal emission out of nature’s road—I must speak plainly, gentlemen!—every act of self-pollution is… an earthquake,” warned one London physician, “a blast, a deadly paralytic stroke.” Esteemed and somber philosophers joined the baying throngs. Rousseau warned against “the most deadly habit to which a young man can be subject.” Kant proclaimed masturbation more sinful than suicide.
By far the most important and influential of these nay-saying authorities w
as Samuel Tissot, one of Europe’s most acclaimed physicians. In 1762 he produced a tome called A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism. This seminal work inspired genuine fear; it was as if one of our most trusted medical authorities, perhaps Dr. Spock, the author of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, had produced a documentary film to warn the public about zombies.
In somber but urgent tones, Tissot discussed one case history after another. One of his patients was a seventeen-year-old watchmaker. Tissot found him lying in bed almost unable to move, pale, emaciated, and “more like a corpse than a human being.” The unfortunate young man had lost his memory almost completely, though he retained enough strength to acknowledge the vile habit that had brought him to this pass. “A pale bloody discharge issued from his nose; he foamed at his mouth; was affected with diarrhea and voided his feces involuntarily; there was a constant discharge of seminal fluid.” Within a few more weeks, he was dead.
The danger in all such cases was the waste of semen. (Masturbation posed life-threatening dangers to women, too, but they had a bit more time to reform, Tissot explained, “the secretion which they lose being less valuable and less matured than the semen of the male.”) So precious was semen, Tissot explained, that the loss of a single ounce weakened the body as much as the loss of forty ounces of blood.
At the same time, then, spermist doctrine held that nearly every bit of semen was unnecessary, and Tissot insisted that every drop of semen was precious. This contrast was not quite fair, because the waste that Leeuwenhoek and other spermists had in mind was of individual sperm cells; Tissot’s waste was of drops of semen. But an epidemic of fear was no time for fine distinctions. A doctrine that waste is part of God’s plan had little chance in an era that preached that waste was a physical and moral catastrophe.
So ovism won the day, and by the early 1700s spermism slunk off the field, defeated. This was, the historian Jacques Roger pointed out, a surpassingly odd development. In this era no one had ever seen a mammalian egg, and yet nearly everyone took for granted that eggs were the key to the mystery of human reproduction; nearly everyone had seen spermatozoa, but nearly everyone rejected sperm cells as irrelevant to the whole sex and conception riddle.
But the ovists had little time to toast their victory. From a small town south of London, called Godliman, came amazing news! An illiterate woman named Mary Toft, the wife of a clothworker, had gone into labor. Her story would provide stark proof that the ovists had celebrated too soon—sex and conception remained absolutely baffling.
It was October 1726. So astonishing was Mary’s story that the king himself sent his doctor to investigate. Newspapers and pamphlets churned out countless breathless updates. All London clamored for more.
By the time things played out, Mary Toft was in prison, and Europe’s scientists were in turmoil.
FIFTEEN
THE RABBIT WOMAN OF GODLIMAN
IN THE FALL OF 1726, MARY TOFT WAS TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD and a mother of two small children (a third had died of smallpox). Those births had drawn scarcely any notice. But her most recent delivery brought the world running. Mary Toft had given birth not to a baby but to a rabbit! So her surgeon and midwife, a man of thirty years’ experience, announced.
For us, the significance of Mary Toft’s story is that it offers up the most damning proof imaginable that, as late as the 1700s, science had scarcely begun to sort out the riddles of sex and heredity. If a woman might give birth to a rabbit, then medicine and biology were truly at a loss.
After that first rabbit, Mary delivered a litter of sixteen more bunnies over the course of the next month, at a rate of about one a day. “Every Creature in town both Men & Women have been to see & feel her,” wrote John Hervey, a well-known figure at the court of King George I. “All the eminent physicians, Surgeons, and Men mid-wifes are there Day and Night to watch her next production.”
The learned authorities were split between those who dismissed the talk of rabbits as ludicrous nonsense and staunch believers who churned out medical pamphlets with such titles as “A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits Performed by Mr. John Howard, Surgeon at Guilford.” Howard, the obstetrician who had reported the amazing news to England’s most acclaimed scientists and to the king’s doctors, had been skeptical at first. Soon he grew so certain the births were genuine that he sent off bits of the newborn rabbits to the Royal Society, preserved in formaldehyde. (None of the rabbits was born alive.)
It should not have taken sensational stories of rabbit births to highlight the message that science had no idea how parents passed on traits to their offspring. Even at this late date, the most run-of-the-mill birth still gave rise to questions that no one could answer. Why do children so often resemble their parents? How does that work? These were ancient puzzles, but ovists and spermists alike had neglected them in order to focus on their squabbling with one another.
Then along came Mary. Her outlandish claims served as a kind of shout that brought a clamorous room to a sudden hush. Enough! What about family resemblances? Mary Toft told a simple story. When she was five weeks pregnant, she’d been weeding a field when suddenly a rabbit had jumped in front of her. She ran after it but couldn’t catch it. A few days later the same thing happened again. Ever since, she’d been obsessed. Too poor to buy meat, she had dreamed endlessly of rabbits. That constant musing, she said, had no doubt shaped the infant in her womb.
The hoax itself was even simpler than this cover story. Shortly before the rabbit births, Mary had miscarried, and she still showed some signs of pregnancy. Now she stuffed bits of cut-up rabbit inside her when no one was watching, and then feigned contractions. Howard, the gullible midwife, “delivered” the furry bits of flesh.
Remarkably, many people found nothing implausible in Mary’s story. Everyone knew that the sights and sounds that a pregnant woman witnessed had considerable power to influence the offspring she was carrying. In the decade of the 1740s, twenty years after the Mary Toft case, the Gentleman’s Magazine in London carried ninety-two such stories. One woman in Chelsea had visited the lions in the Tower of London and been “much terrified with an old lion’s noise.” Soon after, she gave birth to an infant with a “nose and eyes like a lion… claws like a lion instead of fingers, no breastbone… one foot longer than the other.”
More than a century later, belief in this doctrine of “maternal influence” still ran strong. Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, wrote matter-of-factly in the 1880s that “the deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals was passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant’s feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity.”*
This was a belief with ancient roots. The Bible tells of a deal Jacob made to divvy up newborn sheep and goats with his father-in-law. Animals with speckled coats went to Jacob, those with solid colors to Laban. Jacob peeled bark from tree branches to expose the white wood beneath and then placed the streaked, speckly branches near the flock. “They mated in front of the branches,” we read in Genesis. “And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.”
Through the millennia, pregnant women had feared the sight of hares, which were well-known to cause harelip (now known as cleft palate). They tried not to glance at the moon, for fear of giving birth to lunatics. They knew that a glimpse of a strawberry might lead to the birth of a baby with a strawberry birthmark. Worse things could happen—one doctor explained that a woman had given birth to twins joined at the head because, when she was pregnant, she had often met with a friend and, in the course of chatting, the two women had leaned their heads close together.
Sometimes maternal influence could work in your favor.* Women knew that gazing at a tray decorated with a drawing of a healthy baby boy improved the odds that they would give birth to a
boy. (Historians have never found a tray showing a girl.) In wealthy homes, with portraits on the walls, women who had become pregnant in the course of an affair tried to make things right by spending long, nervous hours staring at paintings of their husband, so that the baby would look like his father.
In one particularly desperate case, a French noblewoman named Magdeleine d’Auvermont had skipped the portrait-gazing and resorted to an even thinner tale. In 1637, in Grenoble, France, she gave birth to a baby boy. Her husband had been abroad for four years. Madame d’Auvermont found herself on trial for adultery. (Relatives on her husband’s side, fearful that the baby would inherit his father’s land and title, had brought the case.) Madame d’Auvermont cited the well-known power of maternal impressions—she’d had an especially vivid dream of having sex with her husband, she testified, and almost at once found herself pregnant with their child. The court ruled in her favor, the adultery charge was dismissed, and the newborn baby was officially declared the heir to the family fortune.
MARY TOFT’S SCHEME FELL APART WHEN AN ALLY WAS CAUGHT smuggling rabbit parts to her. She confessed to the hoax and was duly punished, though the authorities seemed reluctant to draw extra notice to the affair. Almost at once the public swung its attention away from the miraculous births and onto the gullible doctors. William Hogarth published an elaborate drawing called “The Wise Men of Godliman,” showing astonished doctors attending a woman in labor while a swarm of rabbits scurried around the floor. Mocking the foolishness of pompous physicians proved nearly as entertaining as waiting for word of new rabbits, and the case dragged on for a few more weeks. But bewilderment about just how inheritance worked was destined to linger for centuries.
The Seeds of Life Page 15