Page:Contraception; 1st ed. (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.94163).pdf/282

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CONTRACEPTION

were steadily improved and made of other materials including isinglass and the cæcum of the lamb. Sheaths appear to have been invented to reduce the chance of disease, see Falloppio "De præseruatione à carie Gallica."[1]

And the year following Albertus Magnus in his great work[2] included mention of contraceptive measures, as he did also in his De Mirabile Mundi a few years later.

Following on these earlier works are a number of tracts and books re-hashing the information given in the Sanscrit and Arabic sources and more or less widely spreading the ideas contained therein. How widely such information was available just before the Puritan ascendancy in England, I have not been able to discover. The fact that at present the Church of Rome condemns contraception and is so opposed to the spread of sex knowledge, is of course, no indication that in the sixteenth century or earlier times it took this line. Indeed it looks as though it were otherwise: for instance the Public Records of Geneva for

  1. ↑ Gabriel Falloppio (1564): "De Morbo Galllico: Liber Absolutissimus." 1st Ed. Pp. 65 Patavia, 1564.
  2. ↑ Albertus Magnus (1565): "De Secretis Mulierum Item De Virtutibus Herbarum Lapidum et Animalium." Pp. 329. Amsterdam, 1565.

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