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From ‘Fructification’ to ‘Insemination’: Nomenclature and the Practice of Artificial Insemination

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The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History

Abstract

From the first reports of its use, artificial insemination has generated complex debates about gender, sexuality, and race. Since the nineteenth century, gynaecologists, biologists, natural philosophers, and social commentators have struggled to understand both the anatomical structure and biological processes of (un)reproductive bodies and what ‘artificially’ assisting conception (‘fructification’) means for families. By tracing the evolution of nomenclature about the procedure in the United Kingdom, France, and the USA, this chapter argues that for more than two centuries, ‘artificial insemination’ has been relentlessly embroiled in questions about the biological and social basis of gender, integrally bound to the movement of knowledge between scientific and lay audiences, a battleground for power between reproductive specialists, and a key site for debates about heredity and the importance of marriage to society.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The secrecy attending artificial insemination is further discussed in Gayle Davis’s and Hayley Andrews’s chapters in this volume. Historians of abortion and adoption have also noted and explored the difficulties of recovering historical sources of hidden, stigmatized, and illegal social and medical practices. Work in the history of adoption has traced how medical authorities, the state, and gender interacted to produce families whose origins were secret. The importance of secrecy in adoption effectively sealed adoption case records to historians, similarly to how the need to protect sperm donor anonymity and the ideal of the biogenetic family has effaced insemination records. For further discussion of these issues, see E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley, CA, 1997).

  2. 2.

    Anne Taylor Fleming, ‘New Frontiers in Conception: Medical Breakthroughs and Moral Dilemmas’, New York Times, 49 (20 July 1980).

  3. 3.

    Dan Cohen, ‘Initial Thoughts on the Google Books Ngram Viewer and Datasets’: http://www.dancohen.org/2010/12/19/initial-thoughts-on-the-google-books-ngram-viewer-and-datasets/. Accessed 6 December 2016; Tim Schwartz, ‘Culturomics: Periodicals Gauge Culture’s Pulse’, Science, 332: 6025 (2011).

  4. 4.

    For other scholarship which analyses nomenclature and language in order to understand wider historical, political, and cultural contexts, see Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, MD, 1999); Londa Schiebinger, ‘Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy’, Representations, 14 (1986); Adele Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the Problems of Sex (Berkeley, CA, 1998); and Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, CA, 2005).

  5. 5.

    Hermann Rohleder, Test Tube Babies: A History of the Artificial Impregnation of Human Beings (New York, 1934), p. 34. For more on the history of J. Marion Sims and issues of consent in medicine during slavery, see Todd Lee Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana, IL, 2002); Durrenda Ojanuga, ‘The Medical Ethics of the “Father of Gynaecology”, Dr J Marion Sims’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 19 (1993); and David A. Richardson, ‘Ethics in Gynecologic Surgical Innovation’, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 170:1 (1994).

  6. 6.

    The Medical Times and Gazette (1866), pp.125–126.

  7. 7.

    James Marion Sims, Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery: With Special Reference to the Management of the Sterile Condition (New York, 1867), p. 193.

  8. 8.

    On the replacement of expressions of generation with ‘reproduction’ from around 1850, see Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 20.

  9. 9.

    See Joseph Thomas, A Comprehensive Medical Dictionary (Philadelphia, PN, 1870), p. 273.

  10. 10.

    Sarah Wilmot, ‘Between the Farm and the Clinic: Agriculture and Reproductive Technology in the Twentieth Century’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 38:2 (2007), p. 310.

  11. 11.

    Paul Mundé, Minor Surgical Gynecology: A Manual of Uterine Diagnosis and the Lesser Technicalities of Gynecological Practice: For the Use of the Advanced Student and General Practitioner (New York, 1880), p. 367.

  12. 12.

    Sims, Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery, p. 366.

  13. 13.

    Mundé, Minor Surgical Gynecology, p. 367.

  14. 14.

    Mundé, Minor Surgical Gynecology, p. 367.

  15. 15.

    Sims, Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery, p. 370; Augustus K. Gardner, On the Causes and Curative Treatment of Sterility, with a Preliminary Statement of the Physiology of Generation (New York, 1856).

  16. 16.

    Joseph Gérard, Nouvelles causes de stérilité dans les deux sexes: Fécondation artificielle comme moyen ultime de traitement. (Paris, 1888); Joseph Gérard, Causes and Treatment of Sterility in Both Sexes: Fecundation by Artificial Methods, trans. C.E. Warren (Boston, MA, 1891).

  17. 17.

    Gérard, Causes and Treatment of Sterility in Both Sexes, Preamble.

  18. 18.

    Sean Quinlan, The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c.1750–1850 (Aldershot, 2007), p. 11.

  19. 19.

    Michael Finn, ‘Female Sterilization and Artificial Insemination at the French Fin de Siècle: Facts and Fictions’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18:1 (2009), p. 41.

  20. 20.

    Philippe Marechal, ‘Propos du docteur: La fecondation artificielle’, L’Écho de Paris, 11 August 1885.

  21. 21.

    Chronique médicale, 5 (1898), pp. 65–71.

  22. 22.

    Félix Dehaut, De la Fécondation artificielle dans l’espèce humaine comme moyen de remédier à certaines causes de stérilité chez l’homme et chez la femme (Paris, 1865).

  23. 23.

    Edmond Pelletier, ‘Les fabriques d’enfants’, L’Écho de Paris, 6 August 1885.

  24. 24.

    Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Volume 1: Education of the Senses (New York and Oxford, 1984), p. 188; Angus McLaren, Sexuality and Social Order: The Debate Over the Fertility of Women and Workers in France, 1770–1920 (New York and London, 1983), pp. 59–62.

  25. 25.

    Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ, 1984); Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford, 1993), p. 217; Karen Offen, ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France’, American Historical Review, 89 (1984); Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2000).

  26. 26.

    Gérard, Causes and Treatment of Sterility in Both Sexes, 436.

  27. 27.

    Martha Hildreth, ‘Doctors and Families in France 1880–1930: The Cultural Reconstruction of Medicine’, in Ann Elizabeth Fowler La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam, 1994), p. 189.

  28. 28.

    Robert A. Nye, ‘Honor, Impotence, and Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Medicine’, French Historical Studies, 16:1 (Spring 1989), pp. 48–9.

  29. 29.

    Finn, ‘Female Sterilization and Artificial Insemination at the French Fin de Siècle’, p. 41.

  30. 30.

    Philip Scranton and Susan R. Schrepfer (eds), Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (New York and London, 2004).

  31. 31.

    Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp. 43–59.

  32. 32.

    Gérard, Causes and Treatment of Sterility in Both Sexes, pp. 388–9.

  33. 33.

    Gérard, Causes and Treatment of Sterility in Both Sexes, p. 408. My emphasis.

  34. 34.

    Gérard, Causes and Treatment of Sterility in Both Sexes, p. 405.

  35. 35.

    Adele Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the Problem of Sex (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1998).

  36. 36.

    Hermann Rohleder, Test Tube Babies: A History of the Artificial Impregnation of Human Beings (New York, 1934), p. xvi.

  37. 37.

    ‘13 Babies in N. Y. Have Test Tube as Father’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 1 May 1934; ‘Test-Tube Babies, A Medico-Legal Discussion’, Scientific American (January 1937).

  38. 38.

    Elizabeth Mosher, ‘Instrumental Impregnation’, Woman’s Medical Journal, 22 (1912), p. 223.

  39. 39.

    Robert L. Dickinson, ‘Artificial Impregnation’, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1 (1920), pp. 255–61.

  40. 40.

    Samuel Raynor Meaker, ‘Correspondence: Two Questions Respecting Artificial Insemination’, New England Journal of Medicine, 210:19 (1934), p. 1037.

  41. 41.

    Meaker, ‘Correspondence’.

  42. 42.

    See Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin; Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction in the Eighteenth Century’, in Faye D. Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp (eds), Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Stratification of Reproduction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1995), pp. 369–86.

  43. 43.

    Compiled by author using the subscription-only research database Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature.

  44. 44.

    John Billings (ed.), The National Medical Dictionary, Vol. I (Philadelphia, PN, 1890).

  45. 45.

    Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America From Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD, 1996), p. 90.

  46. 46.

    For instance, Anon., ‘Miscellaneous Abstracts: Artificial Impregnation’, American Journal of Urology and Sexology, 11 (1915), p. 296; W.E.D. Stokes, ‘Animal and Human Impregnation’, American Journal of Urology and Sexology, 13 (1917), p. 472.

  47. 47.

    G.L. Moench and Helen Holt, ‘Microdissection Studies on Human Spermatozoa’, Biological Bulletin, 56:4 (1929), p. 267; Samuel Rayner Meaker, Human Sterility: Causation, Diagnosis, and Treatment: A Practical Manual of Clinical Procedure (Baltimore, MD, 1934).

  48. 48.

    Grant S. Beardsley, ‘Artificial Cross Insemination’, Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 48 (1940), p. 94; Frances I. Seymour, ‘Eugenics in Practice: Cross Artificial Insemination’, Marriage Hygiene, 3 (1936).

  49. 49.

    Seymour, ‘Eugenics in Practice’.

  50. 50.

    ‘Editorial: X-Insemination’, Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 53 (1945), p. 209.

  51. 51.

    M.L. Brodny and D. Rosen, ‘The Urologist and Artificial Insemination’, Journal of Urology, 61:5 (May 1949), pp. 960–6.

  52. 52.

    A.M. Schellen, Artificial Insemination in the Human (Amsterdam, 1957), p. 3.

  53. 53.

    S.J. Behrman and Yoshiaki Sawada, ‘Heterologous and Homologous Inseminations with Human Semen Frozen and Stored in a Liquid-Nitrogen Refrigerator’, Fertility and Sterility, 17:4 (1966), p. 459.

  54. 54.

    See ‘Synthetic Baby Gives Divorce to Ex-Soldier’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 February 1945; ‘Artificial Bastards?’, Time, 45 (26 February 1945), p. 58; ‘Soldier to Accuse Wife of Adultery in “Test Tube” Divorce’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 August 1945; ‘Mother Wins Divorce: Parent of “Test-Tube” Son, 5, Gets Decree in Chicago’, New York Times, 19 January 1955.

  55. 55.

    The terminology has continued to evolve since the postwar era. The current use of terms such as intrauterine insemination (IUI), intravaginal insemination (IVI), and intracervical insemination (ICI) reflects highly specialized medical knowledge and the technical placement of sperm inside a woman’s body.

Research Resources

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  1. The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Bridget Gurtler

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  1. Bridget Gurtler
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Correspondence to Bridget Gurtler .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Gayle Davis

  2. Department of History, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

    Tracey Loughran

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Gurtler, B. (2017). From ‘Fructification’ to ‘Insemination’: Nomenclature and the Practice of Artificial Insemination. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_5

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