here were molds for making condoms of modern materials. Douches, tablets, creams, powders, applicators, dried bear testicles. Things to wear, insert, ingest, apply. A section on "futuristic" contraceptives displayed nasal sprays, patches, caps, clips, male pills, valve implants.
In Europe, in the Middle Ages, it was said that if a woman wore around her neck a bone from the right side of a black cat, she would not conceive. Lacking this, she might use the bones and dried testicles of a weasel. If that were unavailable, she could fall back on the earwax of a mule, worn as an amulet. These three items were arranged in petri dishes. Mule's earwax, I saw with pleasure, is black. Full of mule hairs.
Mules are hybrids, sterile but not sexless. They might be expected to prefer a museum of erotica to a museum of contraception.
As I scribbled, awestruck, a white-haired gentleman came softly down the hall and introduced himself as Percy Skuy, founder and curator.
I posed my most searching question. "How did you get the mule's earwax?"
He was pleased by my query. Unable to find Canadian mules, uncertain how to secure
cerumen if he found them, he wrote to Ramon Alcantara, medical director of a Mexican sister company. Mexico abounds in mules, and Dr. Alcantara sent earwax and photographs documenting the extraction. (You will need a long probe with a little scoop on the end, and three assistants to hold the mule.)
The bone from the right side of a black cat came from a Toronto veterinarian, after a seven years' wait. "It was also believed that if a woman were to take a weasel testicle and bones and strap it to her thigh, she would not fall pregnant. So I wanted weasel. I was offered other animals, and I said 'No.' I hung out for weasel," said Skuy. "I wanted it to be truly authentic." Finally, a Northern Ontario trapper came to the rescue.
Skuy began as a salesman for Ortho (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) in 1961, at a time when birth control pills were not on the market, and he remembers their introduction fondly. "This was more than just another therapeutic pharmaceutical product," he recalled. "It made change. It was immensely satisfying."
Skuy had a few examples of old birth control methods that he used as props for speeches to pharmacists' groups on contraceptive history. His talks were so popular that he needed more props. He was astonished at how scarce they were. "What I didn't appreciate at the time was: What is the motivation for someone to keep an old contraceptive?" Perhaps there is even less motivation to keep one's parents' old contraceptives.
Over decades, Skuy has hunted for the venerable devices. A doctor in Brooklyn was persuaded to lend the only surviving
"block pessary." This six-sided wooden block has a concavity in each side. It was inserted in the vagina, with the hope that one of the concavities would cover the cervix. Made in the 1920s, a contemporary report calls it "an instrument of torture." Whether anyone used it twice is unknown, but why its users did not lovingly preserve it is easy to guess. When the doctor who'd lent the pessary died, his nephew, finding correspondence about the transaction, requested the return of the mysterious but obviously valuable object. Skuy described his prize, and the heir exclaimed, "Do me a favor. Keep it!"
In his search for elusive historical contraceptives, Skuy was helped by being in the family-planning business, by extensive travel, and by ultimately becoming company president. No Ortho products are displayed, to avoid the appearance of self-promotion.
The museum has 370 models of IUDs. The scariest is several loops of nylon filament. The label coolly notes, "Made by a Dr. G. Burou in Casablanca, who is a keen fisherman. This device was removed from a patient in Montreal."
No word on whether that IUD worked. While most older methods seem based not on double-blind tests but on reckless supposition --- "Mules don't conceive, so if we wear their earwax, we won't conceive!" --- some have grains of plausibility. The crocodile-dung vaginal suppository of ancient Egypt seems fanciful, but Skuy said crocodile dung is the most acidic in the animal kingdom, and might have spermicidal effect. "Was it purely chance that they took crocodile?" The bear's testicles that Indian-French
women in the backwoods of New Brunswick made into a potion also may have been prophylactic. The barbasco root eaten by women of certain Mexican tribes worked, and led to the development of the oral contraceptive.
I've heard it said that cat bones, weasel, and earwax might have been effective simply because they're anti-aphrodisiac. You mention weasel bits and suddenly no one's interested. But this underestimates desire. It's my belief that if, for example, you passed a law that every single teenaged person should daily coat themselves with mules' earwax from head to toe, loop themselves in cat bones, and strap a dried weasel to each thigh before leaving home, levels of teen pregnancy would not even dip.
To make an appointment to visit the Museum of Contraception, call (416) 449-9444. Percy Skuy has retired, and the company is about to publish his "Tales of Contraception: A Museum of Discovery," reputed to be a light-hearted, coffee-table book.
