ABSTRACT
Undocumented tales mentioned artificial insemination (AI) for the first time around 1400. An Arabic chief inseminated his own mares with the semen of a stallion belonging to a rival tribe. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was a Dutch tradesman and is known to have made over 500 microscopes. Fewer than 10 have survived to the present day. His discoveries on the presence and movement of ‘animalculi’, which were sperm cells, were reported in 1677 (Leeuwenhoek 1678). In the eighteenth century, an Italian priest, Spallanzani (1784) inseminated a bitch which whelped three pups (Siebenga 1937). Human artificial insemination was first attempted around 1800 by Hunter, followed by Sims in 1866. Successful AI in rabbits, dogs and horses was first reported by Heape (1897). The Russian professor Elie Ivanov started working with sperm cells at the end of the nineteenth century (Ivanov 1907, 1922). His work stimulated research on AI around the world (Milovanov 1964; Nishikawa 1962, 1964). Significant advances were made in the 1940s in the United States, leading to established procedures used worldwide (Salisbury et al. 1978). This period also saw worldwide studies on AI in pigs: in the United States (McKenzie 1931), Japan (Niwa 1958) and Western Europe (Polge 1956). Boars were trained on mounting dummies (Polge 1956). Other techniques to collect semen included artificial vaginas to apply pressure to the glans (McKenzie 1931; Polge 1956) or the use of a gloved hand (Hancock and Hovel 1959). This minimized the amount of bacterial contamination in the collected semen (Althouse and Lu 2005).
