The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution

Notes

Notes [ 305 ] Introduction 1. The history of IVF was the subject of a recent PBS American Experience documentary , for which one of us, Margaret Marsh, was a consultant. To our surprise, the filmmakers appeared to give Miriam Menkin too much of the credit for the first IVF because they were unable to portray the difference between the researcher who designs the protocols and makes the major research decisions (Rock) and the technician who carries out the technical work (Menkin). The film did, however, generate considerable interest in the history of IVF and did an excellent job of illustrating the social and political controversies that are generated by new technologies. See www.pbs .org/wgbh/amex/babies/filmmore/fd.html. 2. Loretta McLaughlin’s The Pill, John Rock, and the Church: The Biography of a Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), written during Rock’s lifetime, includes interviews with many of Rock’s colleagues and family. Although its focus is different from ours, it conveys the immediacy of living history. 3. Rock’s daughter Rachel Achenbach, who is the custodian of his papers, has given us unrestricted permission to quote and cite from them. Historian Harry Marks notes that because of the nature of the typical historical record, studies that incorporate patients’ voices have been virtually impossible to undertake: “I have yet to encounter a source that would tell me much about patients, other than as researchers imagined them.” Harry Marks, The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13. Bureau of Social Hygiene Collection, Rockefeller Archives Gregory Pincus Papers, Library of Congress John Rock Papers, Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine John Rock Papers, Rachel Achenbach Collection Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection BSH GP-LC JR-CLM JR-RA MS-SS Abbreviations 30 6 Chapter 1. Family Matters 1. The genealogical information comes from records in possession of Rachel Achenbach, including census materials, birth records, and pages copied from Marlborough city directories. 2. See Frank Rock to John Rock, Oct. 18, 1909, JR-RA. 3. Maisie is spelled just like this in her early life; later, others spelled it Mazie or Maizie. 4. Ann Jane “Annie” Rock to Frank Rock, March 9, 1910, JR-RA. 5. See Joseph C. Ryan, “The Chapel and the Operating Room: The Struggle of Roman Catholic Clergy, Physicians, and Believers with the Dilemmas of Obstetric Surgery , 1800–1900,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 3 (Fall 2002), esp. 470–74, for a discussion of cesarean sections. Hysterectomy was often performed at the same time to prevent what could be a life-threatening postoperative infection. Historians know less than we would like about the intimate lives of regular people like Frank and Annie, even if we have learned much about nineteenth-century fertility and sexuality in general. Family size had declined dramatically in the nineteenth century—from an average number of births in 1800 of 7.04 to 3.56 by 1900, although Catholic families, like the Rocks, tended to be larger. Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 31, 77. 6. James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978), chap. 3, and Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 7, provide good summaries of the contraceptives available in the nineteenth century. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, California physician Clelia Duel Mosher asked forty-five married upper-middle-class women about their contraceptive habits, and most of them acknowledged using some form of contraception . Besides withdrawal and periodic abstinence, the women mentioned condoms and douching as other preferred contraceptive means. Clelia Mosher’s survey has been edited and published, with a title supplied by the editors that she would never have chosen. Clelia Mosher, The Mosher Survey: Sexual Attitudes of 45 Victorian Women, ed. James MaHood and Kristine Wenburg (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 7. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 23. 8. Frank Rock to John Rock, Oct. 18, 1909, JR-RA. 9. See Elizabeth “Lizzie” McCarthy to John Rock, July 24, 1908, in which she mentions John’s popularity; letter from Angela (Gately), July 31, 1908, in which she tells stories of Eddie Gately and...