Exotic abortifacients and lost knowledge

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(08)60330-X

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In a moving passage in her magnificent 1705 Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) recorded how the Indian and African slave populations in Surinam, then a Dutch colony, used the seeds of a plant she identified as the flos pavonis, literally “peacock flower”, as an abortifacient:

“The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of this plant] to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. …They told me this themselves.”

Altogether European bioprospectors identified eight abortifacients used by Amerindians and African slaves living in the Caribbean in this period.

Merian's passage is remarkable for several reasons. The German-born Merian was one of very few European women to travel at this time in pursuit of science. Others voyaged, but as lovers, daughters, or wives to where their male companions happened to take them. The French Jeanne Baret, for example, became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1776, but she sailed disguised as the male valet to Philibert Commerson, the ship's botanist and the father of her illegitimate child. Merian, by contrast, voyaged from Amsterdam to the “Wild Coast” of South America in 1699 at the age of 52 years accompanied only by her daughter and in pursuit of her own scientific and economic interests.

Merian's passage is also interesting for what it reveals about the 18th-century global political economy. Natural history was big science in this period; it was also big business. Merian's work was devoted to cataloguing and describing the life-cycle of exotic moths and butterflies, to be sure, but she also sought what we might call “biogold”, valuable plants or insects that brought profit once developed for European markets. Quinine, the antimalarial alkaloid, made millions for the Spanish when discovered in Peru in the 16th century. In Surinam, Merian sought, among other things, exotic varieties of caterpillars that might produce fine thread to rival that of silkworms.

Europeans have long moved plants around the world—in vast quantities and to great economic effect. Long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, plants in the form of spices, medicinal drugs, perfumes, and dye stuffs of all kinds sped along trading routes that stretched from the Far East into the Mediterranean. Coffee, tea, sugar, cacao, jalapa, pepper, and nutmeg were all useful and profitable exotics developed for European markets. Did Merian's peacock flower follow a similar route? Were newly discovered abortifacients marketed in Europe in this period? Was trade in these plants considered lucrative and medically profitable?

In her passage about abortion, Merian tells us that she learned about the abortive virtues of her flos pavonis directly from enslaved women—both Amerindian and African. We know very little about how and why native Americans developed abortive techniques. For many free Amerindians, abortion was used along with contraception to regulate the time and number of births. The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was one of the first to encounter the “Indians” (he did not identify them further) living along the Orinoco river in modern-day Venezuela and Colombia. In his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, he reported that the young wives among them used “drinks that cause abortion”. To his surprise, Humboldt found that these women could time their pregnancies precisely, some thinking it best to preserve their “freshness and beauty” when young and to delay childbirth until late in life in order to devote themselves to domestic and agricultural labours. Others, he found, preferred to become mothers when very young, thinking this the best way to “fortify their health” and “attain a happier old age”. He was astonished that the “drinks” they used did not ruin their health. Typical of the learned men of his day, he assumed that all too often abortion ended in death.

By contrast with those living free, many enslaved Amerindians and the earliest Africans in the Caribbean practised abortion within a colonial slave economy. Abortion among these populations was not a matter of private conscience as we might think of it today; slave women practised abortion, among other things, to resist slavery. Although many women miscarried spontaneously as a result of the hard work, poor food, and extreme corporeal cruelty, some at least induced abortion as a deliberate, desperate act of resistance of vanquished against victor. In an economy where planters sought to breed “Negroes” as well as horses and cattle, refusal to breed became a political act.

Enslaved women's willingness to undergo the trials of abortion also resulted from a sexual economy where these women were used for European men's pleasure. Janet Schaw, a Scottish woman who travelled with her kinsfolk to Antigua in the 1770s, similarly denounced the “young black wenches” who, in her words, “lay themselves out for white lovers” and remarked that to prevent a child from interrupting their pleasure, “they have certain herbs and medicines, that free them from such an incumbrance”. Many a contemporary observer found European planters dissolute, going to bed late, and passing the night in the arms of one or other of his “sable sultanas (for he always keeps a seraglio)”. Masters, whether married to European women or not, kept slaves for this purpose and offered them freely to male guests.

Knowledge about abortifacients alive in the Caribbean was not, however, selected for development in Europe. The flaming yellows and reds of the elegant peacock flower made it a favourite ornamental shrub among the Europeans. Seeds and live specimens of the plant were taken regularly into Europe, but the knowledge of its use as an abortifacient was not. Merian's report of the abortive qualities of the flower was published in 1705. Caspar Commelin, director of the Hortus Medicus and professor of botany in Amsterdam, prepared bibliographical notes for Merian's book and was intimately familiar with its content; despite this, knowledge of its abortifacient qualities did not grow and flourish. Hermann Boerhaave, a leading authority on Europe's materia medica and professor of botany at Leiden, for example, reported “no known virtues” of this plant in 1727 in his Historia plantarum.

Why was this so? Why was potentially useful knowledge stopped at European borders? It would be wrong to think that abortifacients were illegal in Europe in the 18th century, or at least so morally distasteful that naturalists would not have collected them from abroad. No legal consensus governed early modern Europe concerning abortion or the use of antifertility agents. Many towns and rural areas had their own local laws and customs; many practices regulated in towns went unregulated in the countryside. Indeed, centralised statutory laws making abortion criminal in Europe were not passed until the 19th century. For legal purposes, a woman in early modern Europe was not considered pregnant until the child “quickened”, usually near the midpoint of gestation. Before the development of pregnancy tests, women enjoyed considerable freedom to judge for themselves when quickening, or in church parlance “ensoulment”, took place. Although Europeans had their own abortifactients (savin, Juniperus sabina, was a favourite), consumers, then as now, sought out exotic, new remedies.

Other historical forces, however, stopped the peacock flower from ever reaching European shores. The shift in the management of birthing in this period away from midwives to newly minted obstetricians curtailed women's reproductive freedoms. Abortion had traditionally been practised by midwives as well as women themselves. As female practitioners lost ground to obstetricians (men trained primarily as surgeons) over the course of the 18th century, herbal remedies gave way to surgical procedures designed to induce abortion. As midwives were run out of the high-end of their profession (there was always work for them among the poor), abortifacients gradually disappeared from mainstream medicine.

State politics also spoke against developing exotic abortifacients for European markets. Mercantilist expansion mandated pronatalist policies celebrating children as “the wealth of nations, the glory of kingdoms, and the nerve and good fortune of empires”, as Joseph Raulin noted in his De la conservation des enfans of 1768. Given this mindset, neither agents of botanical exploration, trading companies, scientific academies, nor governments, sought to expand Europe's store of antifertility pharmacopoeia. Mercantilist policies that guided global expansion did not define trade in such plants as a lucrative or desirable business, nor did the great East and West trading companies often place women in the field.

Here in this bit of history that did not come to pass we find a prime example of culturally cultivated ignorance—the unspoken but distinct configuration of events that converge to leave certain forms of knowledge unplucked from the tree of life. This curious history of Maria Sibylla Merian's peacock flower reveals how voyagers selectively culled from the bounty of nature knowledge responding to national and global policies, patterns of patronage and trade, developing disciplinary hierarchies, personal interests, and professional imperatives. Trade winds of prevailing opinion impeded knowledge of New World abortifacients from reaching Europe. In this instance, gender politics lent recognisable contours not to distinctive bodies of knowledge but to distinctive bodies of ignorance. Bodies of ignorance, in turn, moulded the lived experience of women. European awareness of antifertility agents declined during the 18th and 19th centuries as development and testing of such agents were not embraced by mainstream medicine and pharmacology. In the process, much useful knowledge was lost and many lives shattered.

Cheryl & ethnovet

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Friday, 3 April 2015