Newspaper Article

Many plants have long history as natural birth-control agents

Boyce Rensberger. The Washington Post

1994

Overview

In fact, according to John M. Riddle, a historian of medicine at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who unearthed the tradition, evidence is accumulating not only that the venerable methods do work in animal tests, but that the knowledge, use and social acceptance of effective, plant-derived birth-control drugs was widespread in the ancient world. Riddle recently published his findings in a book, \"Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance.\" According to Riddle, herbal birth control created much of the wealth of the Greek city-state of Cyrene on the coast of what is now Libya. Cyrenians collected and exported the sap of a plant that the Greeks called silphion and the Romans silphium. An image of the plant appears on 5th century B.C. Cyrenian coins. Even foods in an ordinary diet can have contraceptive effects, [Norman R. Farnsworth] found _ peas, for example. The clue emerged from the fact that in the history of Tibet the population has been stable for periods of up to 200 years. During those times Tibetans subsisted largely on barley and peas. When mice were fed a diet of 20 percent peas, litter sizes dropped in half. At 30 percent peas, the mice failed to reproduce at all.

• Publisher: Las Vegas Review - Journal
• Subject: Farnsworth, Norman R / Riddle, John M