Combination drugs are not polypharmacy. If anything wouldn't they be safer? Less natural fluctuations (if a herb comes from a different region than what you normally buy or was collected a different time of year, etc. and has double the active substance, then a combination drug of five herbs is much less affected).
More speculatively, if five herbs all have the same desired effect and different side effects, then you have less side effects with a mixture (at the same dose that an individual herb would be), since many pharmacological effects are thresholded?
Another source here is the Hippocratic Oath, the oldest form of which we still have today can be dated back to around the 5th century BC. Apart from the "do no harm" part, there's a line about "I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion". The obvious point here is there wouldn't need to be a ban on something unless people were doing it, and it wouldn't end up in the oath unless it was widely known about.
The idea that witch hunts targetting midwives caused contraceptive knowledge to be lost across the west doesn't even slightly stack up. Take England: over the entire Early modern period about 500 people were executed for witchcraft. The population of England was about 5 million over that period. Even if every single person executed for witchcraft was a midwife, you still wouldn't come close to disrupting knowledge transmission in general.
Witch trials were relatively light in England and heavier in other areas-- for example, 4000-6000 people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland. It would be interesting to see if intensity of witch-hunting in an area predicts e.g. what percentage of patent medicine advertised functional abortifacents.
What if 500 people were executed and 5000 people where terrified for their lives? Would you admit to knowing something, when you have watched people being executed for it?
People in the early modern period believed in witchcraft, accounts in witch trials involve things like cursing children to cough up needles or turning into dogs, or dealing with devils - not midwifery practice.
Even if there were a 10 to one bystander effect it still wouldn't be nearly enough to stop the transmission of knowledge. There were 13,418 settlements listed in the 11th century Domesday book, and probably more in Early modern England. The vast majority of people would have never seen any witchtrials nor known anyone connected to them.
Pennyroyal was one of the main ingredients in the ritual drink of the Eleusinian mysteries. Now wondering why my professor never pointed out that connection… wonder if its presence might point to some encoded knowledge about abortifacents, given the nature of the rites.
Interesting history, and well researched. Good point about the midwives, too. It's underemphasized how much antagonism between the sexes is a driving force in history.
I was shown an herbal preparation used as an abortifacient by a tribe in the Amazon, who believed that nobody else yet knew about this particular species. Its use was culturally similar in many respects to the medicines described here, involving fairly complex transmitted knowledge about how and when to harvest it, in what conditions it could be safely used, etc. Presumably there are many such plants worldwide - would love to see a global history expanding on the book reviewed here
Messing with the fertility of your predator is probably good for your children? I would also expect there to be many plants like this (even though insects rather than vertebrates exert most of he herbivory pressure on plants).
Combination drugs are not polypharmacy. If anything wouldn't they be safer? Less natural fluctuations (if a herb comes from a different region than what you normally buy or was collected a different time of year, etc. and has double the active substance, then a combination drug of five herbs is much less affected).
More speculatively, if five herbs all have the same desired effect and different side effects, then you have less side effects with a mixture (at the same dose that an individual herb would be), since many pharmacological effects are thresholded?
Another source here is the Hippocratic Oath, the oldest form of which we still have today can be dated back to around the 5th century BC. Apart from the "do no harm" part, there's a line about "I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion". The obvious point here is there wouldn't need to be a ban on something unless people were doing it, and it wouldn't end up in the oath unless it was widely known about.
The idea that witch hunts targetting midwives caused contraceptive knowledge to be lost across the west doesn't even slightly stack up. Take England: over the entire Early modern period about 500 people were executed for witchcraft. The population of England was about 5 million over that period. Even if every single person executed for witchcraft was a midwife, you still wouldn't come close to disrupting knowledge transmission in general.
Witch trials were relatively light in England and heavier in other areas-- for example, 4000-6000 people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland. It would be interesting to see if intensity of witch-hunting in an area predicts e.g. what percentage of patent medicine advertised functional abortifacents.
What if 500 people were executed and 5000 people where terrified for their lives? Would you admit to knowing something, when you have watched people being executed for it?
People in the early modern period believed in witchcraft, accounts in witch trials involve things like cursing children to cough up needles or turning into dogs, or dealing with devils - not midwifery practice.
Even if there were a 10 to one bystander effect it still wouldn't be nearly enough to stop the transmission of knowledge. There were 13,418 settlements listed in the 11th century Domesday book, and probably more in Early modern England. The vast majority of people would have never seen any witchtrials nor known anyone connected to them.
Pennyroyal was one of the main ingredients in the ritual drink of the Eleusinian mysteries. Now wondering why my professor never pointed out that connection… wonder if its presence might point to some encoded knowledge about abortifacents, given the nature of the rites.
If there was a sex component to the rites, it might have lowered the resulting pregnancy rate.
Interesting history, and well researched. Good point about the midwives, too. It's underemphasized how much antagonism between the sexes is a driving force in history.
I was shown an herbal preparation used as an abortifacient by a tribe in the Amazon, who believed that nobody else yet knew about this particular species. Its use was culturally similar in many respects to the medicines described here, involving fairly complex transmitted knowledge about how and when to harvest it, in what conditions it could be safely used, etc. Presumably there are many such plants worldwide - would love to see a global history expanding on the book reviewed here
Messing with the fertility of your predator is probably good for your children? I would also expect there to be many plants like this (even though insects rather than vertebrates exert most of he herbivory pressure on plants).
It's a good point. A lot of the reason vegetables taste bad is they don't want to be eaten and concentrate bad-tasting chemicals in their leaves, etc.
(Given my prejudices I initially assumed you meant women poisoning their abuser's kids as a form of revenge...)
The exception I suppose is fruit, which quite clearly wants you to consume the bright, round, sugar-filled pulp and spread the seeds around.