Leo J. Latz and "The Rhythm"

Leo J. Latz, a Chicago doctor, first championed the Ogino-Knaus approach in the United States. He contended that the “findings of modern science disclose a rational, natural, and ethical means to space births and to regulate intelligently the number of children.” In 1932 Latz published The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women, which sold over 200,000 copies by 1942, and thus "rhythm" made its way into modern parlance. Latz also shared his approach with the medical community via an article in JAMA in 1935.

Latz advised avoiding intercourse for eight days: for women with a regular menstrual cycle, this began five days before ovulation, with an extra three days tacked on for safety’s sake. As a devout Roman Catholic, Latz advanced this method of fertility control as more in line with Church teachings. He published pamphlets on rhythm for priests to distribute to couples, and parish bingo games gave out his book as a prize. Many shared Leo Latz’s faith in the science behind the Ogino-Knaus findings. But applying them to birth control proved not so simple, nor straightforward. Calculating the time of ovulation can still be tricky. It varies from woman to woman, and a woman can ovulate at a different time each month. Stress, illness, or interruptions in normal routine can also alter a woman’s cycle. Despite these uncertainties, the Ogino-Knaus method caught on, as evidenced by the proliferation of rhythm method calculators after 1930. Companies produced graphs, wheels, calendars, and slide rules, which cost from 10¢ to $5.

Despite Latz's enthusiasm, The Catholic Medical Guardian reported in 1935 that “the calculation of the ‘sterile period’ is never easy and in many cases appears to be impossible.” Interest yet remained, and in 1951 Pope Pius XII sanctioned the Rhythm Method as a “natural” method of regulating procreation. In 1955 over 65% of Catholic women surveyed said they used Rhythm.

Ironically, Leo Latz felt biting backlash for all his efforts to bring an acceptable form of contraception to Catholics. Some felt he went too far. When Latz published The Rhythm in 1932 he served on the medical faculty of Loyola University. According to Leslie Tentler, writing in Catholics and Contraception: An American History (2004), Latz "was abruptly fired from that position in August of 1934," and this action "was almost certainly a direct result of Latz's prominent association with the cause of rhythm." In 1935 Latz confessed to his friend Father Joseph Reiner, S.J., that no one "knew the anguish and dishonor I ...suffered, when people said: 'I heard you were thrown out of the University."

Jim Edmonson

Artifacts in focus : rhythm method calculators

Advertisement for Thurston Scott Welton, The modern method of birth control. New York, W. J. Black [c1935]. Included "The calendar-wheel for finding fertile and sterile dates" in pocket on inside of front cover. Image courtesy of Paula Viterbo.

Learning through the artifact.

One of the great things about working with an important museum collection is that you’re always learning. And boy, with the Percy Skuy Collection on the history of contraception did we have a lot of learning to do! I’d like to share some of the fruits of that learning process by featuring a selection of objects, showcasing some of the more intriguing artifacts that are now on display in our thematic exhibition, Virtue, vice, and contraband: a history of contraception in America.

The Skuy collection is illustrative of several facets of medical artifact collections. First, most visitors are simply amazed at the variety of contraceptives, but this proves to be true of many medical technologies (viz: over 600 variants of OB forceps appeared from the 17th century through the 20th centuries). Contraceptives also provide evidence of significant scientific inquiry and innovation involved in medical technologies, although much of this is a 20th century phenomenon. And lastly, our work with the Skuy collection brought a fuller appreciation of a growing body of scholarship in this domain. These points are well illustrated by a curious set of objects: rhythm method calculators.

Frankly, when we started work on reinterpreting the Skuy collection, I didn’t expect to focus on the rhythm method, and its associated calculating devices. Oh, I knew about rhythm, thanks to my Irish-American mother-in-law, who saw to it that my wife and I got a packet from the Catholic Social Services agency where she worked in Wilmington, Delaware. The packet didn’t get read closely, and in time the packet ended up in the Dittrick’s collection around 1981.

So, as we mapped out the Skuy collection gallery, I expected to give only a passing nod to rhythm. But as we sorted through the collection quite a number of calculators surfaced, chiefly from the 1930s-1960s. This surprised me, and I looked into why so many such items existed and what they tell us about contraceptive technologies.

Conception is central to the human experience, yet for centuries the process remained misunderstood. Doctors giving contraceptive advice in the 19th century often recommended having sex only during the "safe period," when a woman was not ovulating. But before 1930 (and even after), most physicians misidentified the time of ovulation. By studying animal behavior, they thought women were "safe" from pregnancy at the midpoint of the menstrual cycle. This is in fact when women are most likely to conceive.

This changed markedly in the 1920s when Kyusaku Ogino in Japan and Hermann Knaus in Austria studied ovulation carefully. They concluded that it normally occurs from 12 to 16 days before the onset of the menstrual period. They also asserted that an unfertilized ovum had a brief life, probably less than a day. At last, it seemed, the “safe period” could be more accurately determined. And this precipitate a spate of inventive activity, with many calculators being designed, patented, copyrighted, and produced in the ensuing decades.

These developments are the subject of an important dissertation by Paula Viterbo, an editor on the Thomas Jefferson papers. Viterbo’s work is entitled "The Promise of Rhythm: The Determination of the Woman's Time of Ovulation and Its Social Impact in the United States, 1920-1940," State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000; I also commend her article “I got rhythm: Gershwin and birth control in the 1930s,” that appeared in Endeavor in 2004. She kindly helped us by reviewing our exhibit section on rhythm, and attended the opening of the Skuy gallery last September.

In a coming post I will present some specific examples of these calculators that now appear in the Skuy gallery.

Jim Edmonson