Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

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:

The whole of the man’s body is potentially contained in the semen, and the whole of the body of the mother is the soil in which the future man is made to ripen… [Woman] nourishes, develops and matures the seed without furnishing any seed herself. Man, although born of woman, is never derived from woman, but always from man.

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,