About the collection and the exhibit
This unique collection includes a wide range of contraception items, prototypes, and manufacturing devices. The Dittrick Medical History Center learned in August of 2004 that it would receive the Percy Skuy Collection on the History of Contraception. Mr. Skuy, past President of Ortho Pharmaceutical (Canada), assembled the world's most comprehensive collection of historical contraceptive devices, numbering over 650 artifacts. Since its arrival the collection has grown through donations and museum purchases to approximately 800 artifacts. The Dittrick also maintains a collection of literature on the topic, including primary source material as well as historical writings
The exhibit depicts the social and cultural climate that influenced birth control decisions in this country, says James Edmonson, chief curator at the Dittrick. The Dittrick staff with guest curator Jimmy Wilkinson Meyer from The College of Wooster designed the exhibit.
The exhibit reveals a longstanding ignorance of essential facts of human conception. For example, a woman’s ovulation time was not discovered until the 1930s by two doctors, Kyusaku Ogino in Japan and Hermann Knaus in Austria. Before and after this finding, desperate women went to great length to prevent pregnancies. The exhibit explores less well known (and dangerous) methods such as douching with Lysol or eating poisonous herbs like pennyroyal, as well as conventional means such as the IUD or the birth control pill.
A remarkable body of literature was available to assist newly married couples and others. These books were not displayed publicly, on the coffee table, but hidden in a private place.
Examples in the exhibit include; Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People (1832) and the popular 18th century book on anatomy, reproduction and childbirth, Aristotle’s Masterpiece.
In addition to literature, the exhibit draws upon and incorporates the vast collection of contraception devices donated to the university in 2005 by Percy Skuy. The Canadian collector had amassed the world’s largest collections of such devices over the course of four decades.
The exhibit starts in the early 1800s, before Anthony Comstock lobbied Congress to pass the Comstock Act of 1873, responding to what he viewed as a moral decline after the Civil War. While Congress legally barred contraception, a black market for such products and literature flourished. Comstock went undercover to search out and turn in violators of his law in his crusade to stamp out what he defined as smut and obscenity.
In the early 20th century, women’s advocate Margaret Sanger opened a birth control clinic and research institute, flaunting the Comstock Law. Eventually her efforts evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The exhibition also covers some ancient methods of birth control, some unique and folkloric methods, and presents information about the influence of religion on contraception.
"We wanted to have a multi-faceted look at the topic of contraception,"
-James
Edmonson (Chief Curator, Dittrick Museum)
This article is a shortened version of an article written by Susan Griffith for Case Campus News
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