Rating:
(7 reviews)
Author: John M. Riddle
ISBN : 0674270266
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Format: PDF
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In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve's Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?
Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed "secret knowledge" to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception.
Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as "witchcraft" in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by "Eve's herbs" has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.
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- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 15, 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674270266
- ISBN-13: 978-0674270268
- Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 6 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West
As a person who enjoys the study of social history (how people lived) and herbal medicine, this book exceeded my expectations on both counts.Riddle is an historian, so the scholarship in the book is historical scholarship. He moves deftly between conflicting theories of demographics and actual family sizes, at home with his contemporaries and able to argue his somewhat novel opinion on a level playing field. Not surprisingly, historians tend to go along with modern medical thought that there were no effective systems of personal or professional health care prior to our own allopathic tradition in the past few centuries. Herbalists, homeopaths and the like are still fighting for legitimacy against exactly this mindset.
What surprised and delighted me was the thoroughness of Riddle's information on the herbs in question. It must be noted that he does NOT provide recipes for readers to use at home. He isn't playing (herbal) doctor. Regardless, a person with some experience in herbalism or access to alternate texts can easily take the list of herbs from this book and find appropriate dosage and other how to information from that other source--including the important caveat that herbs are not always safe and shouldn't be taken without professional advice or lots of research. Riddle's emphasis is on pointing out which plants have been indicated, by whom in the ancient world, and what science has (or has not) done to test for actual efficacy.
One interesting side note for readers who allow for the possible effectiveness of today's most revolutionary complementary medicine modalities is Riddle's reporting of the fact that, historically, chants (magic) were often listed together with the herbs (medicine) in any given herbal recipe.
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