ABSTRACT
Most people today will associate hormones with the pill. Hormonal contraceptives are indeed the most powerful outcome of the introduction of the concept of the hormonal body in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the possibility of using hormones as contraceptives was mentioned as early as 1921, it took three decades before scientists actually began to develop contraceptive hormones. When the pill eventually came into existence, it was greeted with enthusiasm. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, less than a decade after initial testing in animal studies, the pill was being consumed daily by millions of women all over the world. Never before in medical history had a medical technology witnessed such a rapid and broad diffusion (McLaughlin 1982:38; Segal and Atkinson 1973:350). “Probably the best indicator of its acceptance is the fact that we no longer use a capital P or inverted commas when writing about it, because everyone understands that the pill refers to only one kind of tablet,” at least in the western industrialized world (Bromwich and Parsons 1990:24)
The contraceptive pill was a novelty on the market for contraceptive methods at that time. It was the first physiological means of contraception. That is, it prevented pregnancies by intervening in the internal processes of the body, rather than by means of an extraneous device (Rock 1963: 168).1 Contraception now might be achieved by taking an “aspirin-like pill that would be unrelated to sexual intercourse.” Moreover, the pill was a novelty since it would be the first drug in the history of medicine given to healthy people for a social purpose (McLaughlin 1982:120; Vaughan 1972:51).
