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

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.

The year was 1827, and a German scientist, Karl Ernst von Baer, was investigating the reproductive tract of a bitch. It had of course long been obvious that birds and reptiles had eggs; these were in plain sight. By the seventeenth century, it was suspected that mammals might have them, too, although no one had been able to find one. Leeuwenhoek had searched for a mammalian egg with his increasingly sophisticated microscopes, but he had thrown off the hunt as a lost cause. Using a better microscope, however, von Baer had been able to distinguish a yellowish-white, point-like object within some structures, called follicles, that he had taken from a dog’s ovaries.

Von Baer was curious, so he sliced open a follicle, used the tip of his knife to remove the pin-prick object, and placed it under his microscope. ‘It is truly wonderful and surprising to be able to demonstrate to the eye, by so simple a procedure, a thing that has been sought so persistently and discussed ad nauseum in every textbook of physiology as insoluble’, he later wrote of his momentous discovery. He was ‘utterly astonished’ to see the egg with his own eyes ‘and so clearly that a blind man could hardly deny it’. But blind men there