Like a Virgin (4 page)

The question was, if it was male semen that made babies, what did it contain that could hold such great life-granting power?

At the time that Catherine de Medici was struggling to become pregnant, in the 1530s, most physicians still clung to such classical ideas of reproduction, by then more than two
millennia old. And assumptions about the incredible potency of sperm animated the plans of the scientist later known as Paracelsus, who was studying medicine near Catherine’s home city of
Florence around the time of her birth.

Philippus Bombastus von Hohenheim – who styled himself as ‘greater’ than the Roman physician Celsus – spent much of his life formulating a recipe for the creation of
human life. His recipe involved hermetically sealing a man’s semen in a glass tube, burying the tube in horse manure for forty days, removing
it, and then magnetizing
it. Paracelsus believed that the entombed semen would begin to live and move, until it assembled into a miniature yet transparent human form, a
homunculus
, akin to the atomistic foetus
imagined centuries earlier by the Greeks. After being unearthed, the homunculus was to be fed daily with
arcanum sanguinis hominis
– human blood – and constantly kept at the
temperature of a mare’s womb for a further forty weeks. From this protocol would emerge a human child, as normal as any child born of a woman, except perhaps a bit smaller.

In his own right, Paracelsus was a brilliant scientist, who made substantial and prescient contributions to the practice of medicine. Still, even in the sixteenth century, growing a baby in a
bottle was mad-cap. So why did he think it plausible? By this time, many other notable scientists – from Galen of Pergamum to Leonardo da Vinci – had performed vivid experiments,
including human dissections, to expose human anatomy. But many of Paracelsus’s generation still found it incredibly difficult to cut the cord connecting their thinking to those of their
forebears from the great intellectual centres of Greece. Though Paracelsus opposed many of the doctrines of the ancients, he espoused a definition of parenthood that would not be out of place in
Aeschylus or Aristotle:

Thus, horse manure stands in for the ‘soil’ of the womb, and a child is born.

Further, if a man’s semen was believed to contain everything needed to create a mini-human, then any failure to become pregnant must be due to a fault in the
incubation system – the woman or the horse manure, as the case may be. While Catherine de Medici applied scores of vile potions and lotions to her body in hopes of fertilizing the ground,
Henry simply vouched for his virility by claiming that he had made another woman pregnant while away on one of his campaigns. To prove it, he went so far as to claim as a legitimate heir the baby
girl of a woman who, according to some accounts, he had once raped (or at any rate, he had sex with on only one occasion). Catherine might as well have been born in ancient Greece, when women were
not believed to be necessary for the production of children at all. Henry’s omnipotent semen should have been more than enough. (She and Henry finally succeeded in their efforts a decade
later, and went on to have ten children.)

At the end of the sixteenth century scientists brought new tools to the question of the source of semen’s power. In 1590, an early microscope was crafted by eyeglass
makers in the Netherlands; within thirty-five years, Galileo Galilei had built his compound microscope, which he called his ‘little eye’. Then, in 1670s Delft, a Dutch cloth merchant
and surveyor named Antonie Leeuwenhoek turned his hand to lens grinding. Leeuwenhoek handcrafted around three hundred lenses, improving the technology from the poorer models that were available,
though at first sight his efforts are barely recognizable today as microscopes. Crafted in brass or silver, he made them in a variety of tiny shapes; some looked like the flat end of an oar, others
like an elegant handheld fan, a few like a toilet plunger.
Leeuwenhoek was more than a tinkerer, though, and used his microscopes to make a number of discoveries: of
single-celled organisms, now called protists, in 1674, and of bacteria, two years later. He was also perhaps the first person to use these novel instruments to observe semen up close.

At first, it seems he was less than keen about putting semen under his microscope, or studying anything to do with sex, for that matter. This changed in 1677, when Johan Ham, a medical student,
called on Leeuwenhoek at his home and presented him with a sample of semen that had been extracted from a patient with gonorrhoea. Ham thought he had seen small animals with tails writhing around
in the fluid, and wanted confirmation. The claim captured Leeuwenhoek’s interest. He began observing his own semen – acquired, he stressed, ‘not by sinfully defiling’, but
from natural conjugal coitus. Through his crude microscopes he confirmed that there were ‘a multitude of animalcules, less than a millionth the size of a coarse grain of sand and with thin,
undulating transparent tails’. Since he had been studying his own semen, the animals were unlikely to have been parasites or linked to gonorrhoea – in Leeuwenhoek’s scientific
opinion.

Nevertheless, based on his reports, the tiny, tadpole-like creatures came to be known as ‘spermatic worms’, from
sperma
, Greek for ‘seed’. In 1700, they were
included in a book on human parasitology,
An Account of the Breeding of Worms in Human Bodies
, by Nicolas Andry, an influential proponent of the idea that life was generated only by sperm.
In 1820, when the modern name
spermatozoa
– adding the Greek
zoa
for ‘living being’ – was coined, sperm were still considered to be a sort of parasite. (Around
that time, Richard Owen, Charles Darwin’s contemporary and bête noire, even classified sperm into the group of parasitic worms called Entozoa.) It is understandable that what appeared
to be a moving, living being should have been taken to be a symbiotic animal that infected the life-infused semen of males, but not the reproductive fluids of females.

Having seen sperm first-hand, and being unable to detect the presence of anything similar in women, Leeuwenhoek himself began to suspect that the female ovaries were ‘useless
ornaments’. He noted that male rabbits that were grey only ever produced other grey rabbits – evidence that semen provided the sole contribution to the creation of offspring. He
considered it ‘proof enabling me to maintain that the foetus proceeds only from the male… and that the female only serves to feed and develop it’. Leeuwenhoek further claimed
that his semen sported complex anatomical structures – nerves, arteries, veins – though no one else was able to observe them. He made a point of emphasizing these features in his
drawings, noting that in semen ‘there may be as many parts as in the human body itself’.

In 1694, the Dutch mathematician and physicist Niklaas Hartsoeker built on Leeuwenhoek’s work to describe what the preformed animalcules looked like. Hartsoeker, who worked with rooster
sperm, claimed that it was he who in fact had first discovered the animalcules in sperm, not Leeuwenhoek. In any case, it was Hartsoeker who first made the animalcules tangible to those who had not
seen them with their own eyes. In his
Essai de dioptrique
, on optical instruments, he published a drawing of the
homunculi
, or little people, who inhabited each sperm. Hartsoeker
described the egg as ‘no more than what is called the placenta’, once again defining the female’s function as nothing more than nurturing a foetus that had been formed from semen,
now sperm, alone. But then, Hartsoeker hadn’t actually seen the animalcules with his own eyes; he had simply imagined that they might look like tiny, perfectly formed children, complete in
every detail. As the head of one sperm, he drew a child curled up in a foetal position; in the other two sperm, the heads are children sprawled out, seemingly asleep or in a state of suspended
animation. Each sperm’s tail dangles from the children’s pates like a Victorian man’s nightcap. In his musings, Hartsoeker went on to suppose, correctly, that a foetus growing in
a womb would require the means for becoming physically attached, in some way, to its mother. This, he proposed, was the purpose of the tail of the sperm, which would subsequently develop into the
umbilical cord.

Hartsoeker’s drawings represented no more than fantastical speculation, but five years later, in 1699, a French aristocrat and astronomer named François de Plantades reported that
he had seen exactly what Hartsoeker had predicted. Peering through his microscope, Plantades said he had spotted miniature human forms, tucked inside the heads of each sperm. Perhaps for reasons of
professional etiquette (he served as secretary of the Montpellier Academy of Sciences), he published his findings under the pseudonym of Dalenpatius, with his paper appearing simultaneously in
London, Edinburgh, and Amsterdam. Dalenpatius’s claim, however, was nothing more than a hoax, an attempt by Plantades to ridicule those who believed in preformed, make-your-own humans and
microscopic animalcules. If his goal was to bring the whole field into disrepute, he was grossly unsuccessful. The existence of strange and mysterious creatures in sperm gained new credibility, and
the little sperm people became entrenched in popular belief for the next one hundred years.

In this way, even though scientists now had the tools to investigate the body and no longer had to rely on intuition, many swore they saw things that simply did not exist – and would point
to the microscope as their proof. And so reproductive science continued to remain faithful to the ideas promulgated by Aristotle and Galen.

These ideas were repeated in the widely circulated
Aristotle’s
Masterpiece
, a compendium of medieval medicine and folklore thought to have been written around
1680. (It is also known as
The Works of Aristotle
, though it was certainly not penned by the philosopher.)
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
includes some excerpts from his work, as well
as of the writings of Galen and the tenth-century Islamic physician Ibn Sina, who himself wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s findings. The book includes descriptions of midwifery, female
reproductive organs, and all things related to sex and embryos. Because of its sexual content, it was considered pornographic, so much so that it was banned – and remained banned in the
United Kingdom until 1960. In the United States, however,
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
was more accepted. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was the most commonly read medical
text – despite the arrival of the new microscopes, dissection tables, and complex experimentation, which completely contradicted the book’s depictions of the workings of
reproduction.

For nearly two millennia, sperm reigned supreme. Then, it was discovered that mammals also had eggs.