It is sufficient to say that the cause [of infertility] was solely in Henri II… nothing is commoner in surgical experience than such a malformation as the prince’s, which gave rise to a jest of the ladies of the court.
The odd position of the opening of Henry’s urethra appears to have twisted his penis into a downward curve. Chances are that he simply couldn’t get the royal semen to where it needed to be. Yet, Catherine got the blame.
Throughout human history, our understanding of how babies are made has been draped in layers of myth and assumptions, many quite heavily stained by the politics of gender. Human dissection was taboo for most of recorded history, and effective microscopes would not be fabricated until the seventeenth century. For millennia, it was not easy to figure out what was really going on inside a pregnant woman’s body, which made it much easier to assume that what was happening there was either miraculous or meaningless.
Fertility appears to have been among the earliest concerns of the earliest humans. In Bronze Age societies, these reproductive affairs were viewed simply: by some form of magic, a woman grew large, and out of her body came a child. It was women, not men, who were worshipped as the givers of life; women who were placed on a pedestal for their seemingly miraculous powers. Some of the very earliest objects of worship found by archaeologists working around the Mediterranean are wide-hipped, corpulent-bellied, ample-breasted figures: unmistakably female. In some cases, these figures appear to have once held opium-rich poppy heads – an invaluable panacea, often used to ease the excruciating pains of childbirth. One such statue, carved from mammoth ivory, has been dubbed the Venus of Hohle Fels; discovered in 2008, it is thirty-five thousand years old, the oldest known figurine representing any human form. These early artworks, and the Venus of Hohle Fels in particular, emphasize our external sexual organs, that is, how sex works, superficially.
The next great breakthroughs in exploring the mechanics of sex are found housed in the archives of Tehran University. There, the catalogue lists one of the few remaining manuscripts of the Kitab al-Hayawan, or Book of Animals, by the ninth-century Muslim scholar al-Jahiz – a document too delicate for any but the most circumspect of scholars to handle. In this great work describing hundreds of animal species, al-Jahiz included a volume, then only recently translated into Arabic, entitled On the Generation of Animals by the philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle’s tract had been salvaged from near oblivion by the physician Thabit ibn Qurra, who wrote widely on medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. Al-Jahiz and Thabit were part of a group of medieval Islamic thinkers who, through the darkest ages of European science, preserved, utilized, and developed the medical ideas that had been elaborated centuries earlier by the Greek masters – Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen. Thus, when in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Western Europe emerged into the Renaissance, the biological concepts they resurrected belonged squarely in the third century BCE – including the belief that reproduction was predominantly a male affair.
This idea was not a completely new one, even in the third century. The Egyptians and the Indians as far back as the fourteenth century BCE described a man’s contribution as the seed sown in the fertile ground of a woman’s body. The great Greek dramatist Aeschylus, in his tragedy The Eumenides from 485 BCE, defines a parent as ‘he who plants the seed. The mother is not the parent of that which is called her child but only nurtures the new planted seed that grows.’ Even following that line of thought, men and women should have held the same reproductive value, because women were, in theory, still required. But a parent was the person who planted the seed, which meant a woman could only play the role of nurse.
Aristotle was the son of a doctor, so he may have been familiar with these common conceptions long before he attended Plato’s Academy in Athens to study philosophy and science. Around the time of his teacher’s death, in 347 BCE, Aristotle moved to Assos, in Turkey, to set up his own school, and then moved on to the neighbouring island of Lesbos, where he became tutor to the son of King Philip II of Macedon, later Alexander the Great. Inspired by Aristotle’s teachings, Alexander was inclined towards medicine, but he eventually preferred conquering the world. Once his teaching assignment was fulfilled, the master returned to Athens and sat down to complete his book on the animals. In it, he covered a massive amount of ground, including the origin of sperm, the causes of pregnancy and infertility, and the purposes of menstruation and lactation.
From the outset it was clear to Aristotle that semen was the male contribution to making a baby. In trying to pinpoint the female equivalent, he landed on menstrual blood. In Aristotle’s well-honed reasoning, both ejaculation and menstruation appeared during adolescence. He also observed, perhaps from home experiments, that after repeated ejaculation semen became bloody; thus, like a woman’s monthly period, semen, too, must be made out of blood. As far as Aristotle was concerned, each animal could only have one kind of bodily fluid from which to make babies. Because the female had bleeding, she could not have semen – or something else that contributed to the creation of children.
However it was that Aristotle conducted his research, he was aware that a woman didn’t just bleed; she could at times also release a clear fluid during sex. He resisted the idea
