Dan Snow's History Hit - Vasectomy

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

What do you think of when you think of birth control? Is it condoms, IUDs, the pill? What about vasectomies?From monkey testicles to possible cancer treatments to ties of honour, over the past 150 years ‘the snip’ has had a few variations and uses … not all of them are scientifically sound. But what is it? And how did it come about?Kate Lister is joined on Betwixt the Sheets by Georgia Grainger to discuss the vasectomy’s place as a contraceptive, as well as its relationship with eugenics and masculinity.WARNING this episode includes mentions of mental illness, eugenics and themes of an adult natureProduced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Pete Dennis.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi there History Hit listeners. I probably don't need to tell you about this because everyone already appears to be listening to it, looking at the chart position. But History Hit's got another podcast out called Betwixt the Sheets. It's with Kate Lister, brilliant historian. She's been on this podcast many times. It's a history of, I don't know, sex, scandal, society. The stuff that intrigues Kate Lister with her wonderful mind and will certainly intrigue you too. It's going crazy. Everyone's listening to it. Everyone's talking about it. Join the gang. Betwixt the sheets, wherever you get your pods. Hello, dear listener. This is Kate Lister jumping in here with a warning

for you that this episode of Betwixt the Sheets contains absolutely no adult themes or sexual content whatsoever. I'm kidding. I am kidding. Honestly, there is loads of it in this episode. So if you don't want historical smutty talk or pretty graphic descriptions of how vasectomies are carried out, then you are perfectly welcome to sit this one out. To anyone else who's still with me, let's do this. And here's a pretty scene, a father and his five daughters. You can only see three of them. The other two are behind him and, doesn't it? Although mentioning that in public

might bring a wince to the eyes of anyone with the necessary equipment. But what is a vasectomy exactly? How might it be the answer to all of our contraceptive problems? And why wouldn't it be? I'm Kate Lister and today on Betwixt the Shoots, I am going to find out. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. What about ERA? What about now? What about ERA?

What about now? Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful times. Goodness has nothing to do with it, does it? What about ERA? make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful times. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. A vasectomy is a 99.99% effective method of contraception carried out under local anaesthetic in just a couple of minutes by a trained professional

by the way, don't give that a go yourself, but how does it actually work? Charlotte and Sophie went out and about to ask some entirely unqualified people how they thought vasectomies are performed. Uh, I think they put something in your willy. By a very soft-hand man with a nice gentle voice and the smell of burning pig flesh. Tying up tubes? Yeah, ties up the knot, sews everything back up, job done. Far under general anaesthetic, through your genitals I guess. Today I am joined by Georgia Granger who's been studying the social history of vasectomies at the University of Strathclyde. We explore how vasectomies have

impacted eugenics and contraception and what it means to be a man and masculinity in general. So hold on to your scalpels kids, we are going in. going in. So Georgia, I'm so thrilled that you are here and that I can speak to you about this. First of all, let's introduce you and then we're going to introduce the subject, which is amazing. So you are Georgia Granger and you are a third year PhD student at the University of Strathclyde and you are researching the history of vasectomy. Yes, I am. That's just spectacular. How did you get into that? Kind of a roundabout way. So I had focused a lot on masculinity in my undergraduate and my master's

but primarily on like gay masculinity and queer masculinity and stuff like that so I was kind of interested in studying men but I was looking usually at marginalized men and then this kind of opportunity came up to look at vasectomies because it's not really been studied there's been a lot of study of contraceptives and like abortion and that kind of thing that's been a growing area of study but nobody's really looked at vasectomies it's so true and i thought that was really interesting because for as much as I was looking at the hidden histories of marginalized men and silenced men, this was like a silenced area of history for the dominant group, predominantly straight men. And so that really interested me.

So that's kind of how I got into it. It's so true because when you think about birth control and about surgery around birth control is you immediately go to hysterectomies, contraceptive pills, all of those things. And there's this whole history of vasectomy that we don't really think about, do we? And you know, when I knew I was going to be talking to you, I suddenly had that moment, which I'm sure you did, of like, God, yeah, why aren't people talking about this? But I want to start right with basics, as far back as we can go

what's a vasectomy let's just start there so a vasectomy is where the vas deferens which are the little tubes that come out of the testes where the sperm are made it goes into the bit where the sperm's incorporated into the semen so to make it nice and gloopy. I love that. Before being ejaculated. And so the little tubey bits are the vas deferens and they are cut and that stops the sperm going into the semen. So semen is still produced, but it doesn't have any sperm in it. Doesn't have the gloop. Well, it's still gloopy. It just doesn't have any, I was going to say nutritional value. It doesn't have any uh i was going to say nutritional value that's doesn't have any

genetic value it's no good for you at all no exactly um so it means that it is sterile and cannot be involved in conception sterile gloop thank you so much what i was thinking about was this is like i don't know much about the history of vasectomy, but the history of castration, that's quite long, isn't it? And these are different things. Yes. So castration is usually where the testicles themselves are removed or the testes are removed. So that interacts with like hormone levels that reduces testosterone and stuff like that. Vasectomy does not affect hormone levels at all so it's kind of they're quite linked i don't know a lot of people think of them together but they are separate things so vasectomy purely makes it so that the man is sterile whereas

castration affects testosterone levels and other hormone levels castration there's no gloop at all there's no gloop at all do There's no gloop at all. Do you know what? I should have said this right at the beginning. This could be a little bit graphic. And that if people are sat there eating their breakfast or whatever they're doing, just buckle up, just go with us. Yes.

I've got too used to talking about it, but it can be a little bit graphic. And then also I do talk about eugenics and stuff, which is pretty grim. So you've got a really like high shock value of just yeah yeah I'm just used to writing about the awful stuff and the weird stuff just semen testicles and castration at nine in the morning yeah brilliant so that's what it is so can I ask you this might be a bit difficult but what do we know when the first vasectomy happened who it was and what the hell did they think they were doing at the time yeah so it feels like this should be the basic kind of start of a

history of vasectomy and this took me about three years to start figuring out wow okay because there's no history of vasectomy written all these different sources kind of mention like oh the first vasectomy was performed by so-and-so. And they all mention different people in different years. So I'm like, okay, great. So I think the first one was by Félix Guillaume and he was French and that was 1885. He performed something kind of like a vasectomy on a human.

Something like a vasectomy. Well, that's not what anyone wants to go in for i know some sources say that he only blocked the vas deferens okay instead of cutting it but i don't know how he blocked it and also now there are implant vasectomy things that are being trialed that are basically the same thing so i'm like if they count as a vasectomy then what he did count as a vasectomy basically he stopped the sperm getting to the gloop. So that counts. He blocked it.

Yes, I don't know how. We do. A stapler. Yeah, maybe. But so he possibly did the first one in 1885 on a human. It had been tried on dogs before that. They knew that neutering a dog so castrating a dog was helpful yeah in some ways like first of all for making sure you don't get puppies unexpectedly

true but also for like dogs behavior and stuff sometimes people do that to lower aggression and stuff because it affects testosterone levels stop them humping your leg yeah and also they thought that if the dog or if a human had an enlarged prostate that this would reduce the size of the prostate does it no it doesn't but for a while they really thought it did so that was actually guillain's first one was to reduce the size of a prostate in a man with an enlarged prostate do we know if it worked or if he thought that it worked well so there were a lot of reports for like 30 40 years that it worked but it's not used for that now i think we just have much better ways of doing that now do we know who the i was gonna say victim well do you know the patient was no i don't know who the patient

was i'm trying to find a lot of these medical records or like they're kind of part medical record, part experiment records. Yeah. And they're all over the place and quite difficult. But I do know that there was a doctor in London called Reginald Harrison in 1894 who was doing them quite a lot.

And he wrote about them quite a lot, again, for prostate atrophy. So if you're listening, this is going to make me wince and I don't even have this equipment, but this would have been done without anaesthetic. Is that right? Yes, that is right. They would have had cocaine or alcohol. I've seen stupider things done under the influence of those. Yeah, I think that would go quite a long way to maybe making it less unpleasant but yeah they didn't have our you know lidocaine injections

or local anesthetic or whatever oh my god and they didn't have general anesthetic to knock men out so this was around the time that chloroform was starting. So they might have got a wee bit of chloroform to help as well. So they'd have been groggy or high. Yeah, exactly. Cocaine was quite a good local anesthetic. So they might have had it injected or massaged in. Jesus, that's a hell of a come down that one, isn't it? That's something else.

Yes. So they'd have been awake ish and there wasn't antiseptic either was there no there wasn't and there wasn't really antibiotics either so if you got an infection in that in the healing process which happens yeah sometimes like not all the time but if that happened you don't have your injections or tablets of antibiotics so you just get i guess gangrene or sepsis or whatever starting in your testicles or more cocaine rubbed on your balls yeah see these are the pioneers of vasectomy history and we don't know anything about them these poor fellas who had their testicles yeah rubbed with cocaine and then, oh my goodness.

And the dogs as well. We'll give a shout out to them. Yes, the dogs went through a lot. There was a doctor who did a lot of vasectomies on dogs in like the 1820s and 30s or something. Oh, it would never pass ethical review now, would it? I don't think so. All right, I could spend a long time going into the real gore stuff, but I'll try and move it along.

Why were they doing this? So the first one was to try and reduce an enlarged prostate. Yes. So in the beginning, was it about not getting people at the duff? No, not really. It was mainly for the prostate stuff to start with. So enlarged prostate can quite often come with age as well. Older men are more likely to have an enlarged prostate. So it was kind of seen as like maybe

it would help older men to reduce their prostate size. But then there was also this doctor who started doing a lot of essentially early endocrine research so early hormone research right and he did a lot of stuff around injecting blended testes into people to give them like what would be now seen as like a testosterone injection yes but they hadn't quite got to that stage so it was just we'll take the whole testes of like a monkey and blend it up and inject them this doesn't work by the way please nobody try this no at home please don't castrate animals and blend them up that's not good no no no go and see your gp they also did guinea pig testes oh my god the literal guinea pig and i have guinea pig and they are tiny like why that's not going to do anything you need a lot

of guinea pigs to get an injections for not gonna do anything for the guinea pigs either no so so they were doing this in the idea that by sort of like boosting their own testosterone levels they would be kind of rejuvenated and yes vital and exactly so they had connected some of the impacts of testosterone without quite realising it yet. So that was things like increased strength, supposedly, and increased virility was one of them. Is this about erections? Yes, stronger erections.

Yes. And curing erectile dysfunction and stuff like that. And now these things, you can get prescribed testosterone for them so we do think that works to some extent but not like this is a bad method this is not a good method and so this guy who was doing all the blending up of animal testicles and stuff he also then decided that it'd be a great idea to give vasectomies on the basis that maybe it's the the sperm getting reabsorbed that is giving these incredible health benefits i see like rejuvenating the men so that the sperm instead of going to the goop and coming out of the body and being wasted you're

wasting all this life energy and life force that you reabsorb that and suddenly you're going to be 20 years younger and stronger and amazing. Okay, so we've got people who are liquidizing monkey testicles to try and be better in bed and we've now got vasectomies being used to kind of like stop the sperm getting out

and allow it to flow through your body and kind of transform you into like a sexual hulk yes yeah so this is the same guy it's he's called eugene steinack and he was nominated for the nobel prize in physiology like six times he never got it but for some of this research he also had research that was around supposedly curing homosexuality with some of these injections. Cancelled. We've cancelled him. Yeah, he's very cancelled. I mean, for so many reasons. Yeah. But yes, injecting people with animal testicles to try and cure homosexuality is not great. It's out there, isn't it? I mean, who was being injected with this?

Is there famous people? Do we know of any high profile? The injections really took off. They became quite trendy in a lot of Europe and America, actually. There was people across Europe and America that were getting these injections. There were also some famous people got the Steinach vasectomies. So sometimes the Steinach vasectomies were were one-sided so they'd only snip one vast deferens and half price yeah so you're reabsorbing 50 of your sperm but you can still get someone pregnant i guess is the benefit i see i see the logic yes right okay um so you can put your

improved directions to good use um hashtag science yes so Freud actually got a stynac vasectomy sigmund Freud Freud Freud oh my goodness um and interestingly it was not for a Freudian reason because when I first found out that he got one I was like oh is it some sort of like weird you know another thing was imagining it was his father or something, I don't know. But it was actually because he had jaw cancer and this was to cure his jaw cancer. Now that is some struggled thinking to get there, isn't it? How does having a vasectomy help your jaw? Well, first of all, it doesn't. But the thinking was that cancer was a part of an aging process. So, you know, it's your cells degrading and stuff. So you're more likely to get cancer as you get

older and therefore it's an aging process. So something that is anti-aging is going to reverse the effects of cancer. And he had already had like radiotherapy, he'd had surgery and stuff. This wasn't his first choice god no but he obviously wasn't getting anywhere with those things and was like well may as well maybe a vasectomy will help and it didn't okay so this is about reversing the aging process which is kind of ironic isn't it have you ever heard that thing that semen's supposed to be really good for your skin? Yes. Yeah. And they're having these operations to, you know, mangle their goop.

Well, so that they get the benefits instead of giving them to all their wives. Of course. Of course that's what's going on. You don't want to waste it on your wife. Oh my God. Poor, not to say poor Freud, but no, silly, silly man. Yes. So Freud did this.

Freud got one. The Irish writer W.B. Yeats got one as well. Was this a cancer thing? No, it was not a cancer thing. It was just an aging thing. He had found that he had like real writer's block and he also had low libido. Well, who wouldn't get an operation on their genitals

when they've got writer's block? Exactly. Well, he was like, you know what? I'm feeling very uninspired, both in my creative work and also sexually. So maybe I need a vasectomy. And it worked for him. Okay. He said that he went through a second puberty because he was like a horny teenage boy.

He didn't use those words. But there's no medical evidence that that would actually work not really so this is a placebo this is placebo there is evidence that a lot of men do report better sex lives after a vasectomy oh i didn't know that but it's because they don't have the worry about pregnancy so it takes away any of the stress and that kind of thing okay so a lot of them report finding it more fulfilling and satisfying and everything because they're not having to worry about that. So it could be to do with that. But also there is a whole like the fact that he started writing a lot more as well.

And he had some really creative writing moments and stuff. Because of his goop. Yeah, because apparently. His magic goop. the creativity is in the sperm who knew creative juices were not flowing no or they were they were just wow okay i mean if it worked for him yeah ish although he did say that his general health got worse afterwards because of the stress of keeping up with his second puberty no yes so i think he was having so much sex that it was affecting his health i'm too tired to write yeah oh bless him

so so we've got we've got people using it to reduce prostates there are vasectomies to try and improve libido vasectomies to reverse the aging process vasectomies to aid writer's block yeah which is an interesting one when did it start because i wouldn't have thought of any of that when it came to a vasectomy so when did it start being used as contraception to stop babies yes so it started being used kind of as involuntary contraception. Oh, that doesn't sound good. During the eugenics movements. Yes. Right. Okay. Tell me about that. Not super fun. So this was at the same time. So in the very early 1900s in the US,

it started being used. There was a doctor in indiana who without any legal backup or anything just decided that he was going to vasectomize a bunch of prisoners he vasectomized like 500 of them wow and then started pioneering laws across the u.s to bring this in as a general thing what was his name he was called dr sharp that's not funny that's not i know terrible man extremely cancelled but very much nominative determinism oh that's unfortunate can you just explain a little bit about what eugenics is so we're really clear on that what is it yes so eugenics comes from the belief that a lot of traits are passed on and therefore if we sterilize or kill or otherwise stop certain people passing on their genes that we will create a cleaner and purer race and it is quite often used specifically against disabled people and mentally ill people and

those kind of groups, and also against non-white people. So it is what Hitler was doing with a lot of the sterilization and the killing and that kind of stuff. It started in the US. It started mainly in California, had the biggest sterilization program for eugenic reasons. And it wasn't a fringe quack movement this was it? No it was huge in America and Canada and in a lot of Europe a lot of western Europe it didn't get legalized in the UK but they had a committee on voluntary eugenic sterilization, they called it.

Wow. Which was basically if you were institutionalized for health or mental health or something like that, behavioral stuff, that you would be offered sterilization. And if you took it, you might be freed. Oh, my God. So it's coercive. Yeah. Because you want your freedom. So you'll do what it takes to get your freedom. But they said it was voluntary because you're agreeing to it instead of it being forced on you.

So forced slash voluntary slash not really voluntary vasectomies starts in American prisons as part of this idea that we can breed a better race by stopping undesirables from breeding. Well, it started actually because they thought it might correct the behaviour of the prisoners. They thought that like dogs, when you castrate them, it doesn't even work on dogs when you give them a vasectomy, but they thought that maybe violent offenders would become less violent or sexual criminals would become less sexually motivated and stuff like that that didn't work but at some stage this kind of morphed into well these people would be bad

parents anyway so we should stop them from being parents and do we really want more people like this in society we should stop them passing on their genes because they clearly have bad genes wow and obviously this completely ignores any influence on people's behavior that might come from like class or poverty or you know abuse or anything like that it was like no it's in their dna and we want to stop it they were sterilizing women as well weren't they they were yeah so they were sterilizing men and women different countries had different balances. So some countries sterilized more women than men and other countries sterilized

more men than women. Give me an idea of dates. When did this start? So Dr. Sharpe did his first ones in 1899, I think it was. And then this continued until Canada had eugenic sterilization laws into the 1970s 70s yes holy wow okay so the decade Star Wars came out they were still yeah it was still legal in some cases in fact in the UK and in other countries you can get a court ruling to sterilize someone against their will because they have a disability or something like that. So depending on your perspective, it is still going on.

But major programs were up until the Second World War. The fact that the Nazis used it made it fall a bit out of favor. People didn't want to do what the Nazis were doing. Okay, this is quite a dark and nasty history then isn't it it is it's pretty grim and even though it wasn't legalized in the uk they were super aware of it you know these discussions were taking place in the medical journals like the lancet and the british medical journal they were having back and forth discussions about look at sweden bringing in the eugenic sterilization laws, or look at the Californian

experience, they quite often called it. And this was involuntary, a lot of it. This was different levels of voluntary. That just doesn't sound good, does it? Different levels. Exactly. And the British eugenicists quite often said that it was going to be voluntary in Britain if they got what they wanted. But then when they brought a private member's bill to Parliament, the MP who was kind of presenting it said, oh, but this would just be a step on the way to involuntary sterilization. So he kind of scuppered it for them because they were trying the whole way to be like, no, we would only ever do voluntary. This would only ever be a voluntary thing. And then he said, oh no, no, this is part of the plan.

So funny enough, that didn't really help. And it was part of the reason that it didn't get passed in the UK. Well, thank God. I'll be back in a bit with Georgia. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, right. Okay. oh right okay so vasectomies we've got guinea pigs and monkeys and jaw cancer and writer's block through to eugenics nazis preventing birth when did it start getting to the point where people would go this sounds like a good idea that I will voluntarily when you think of a zectomy I don't think of all of this awful stuff do you just I mean I don't know why I don't but it's just I didn't until I started this my project was originally going to be from about 1970 to 2000 and all of this happens i mean what we've covered so far goes up to about 1945 you know second world war um and i was like no i really need to include all this stuff that happened in

the early 20th century because it's so interesting and then there's kind of a quiet period after the second world war it's gone we'll leave people's nuts alone they've been through enough yeah i think they were kind of like we've got more important things to do we're still rationing we still need to like rebuild the country all that kind of stuff yeah but so then in the 1960s it starts to become a little bit more acceptable there's an organization who were actually for population management oh that sounds dodgy this was part of the overpopulation crisis of the 1960s and 70s. Okay. And this was driven by the belief that developing countries were having too many children

and that we were going to run out of land and food and everything. And this became quite a big deal in the US again, mainly. And they started funding contraceptive programs around the world. Oh, did they? Yes. Because America doesn't have a great rap for doing that at the moment, does it? No, I mean, when I say they were funding contraceptive programs, I mean they were saying to India that they would deny food relief

if they didn't provide sterilization en masse to their population. Just as I was thinking well done America that's quite progressive. No no no you can't have food unless you get this done. Some of them were progressive because of the people involved in them but they were not especially picky about how they were carried out and they would wait until there was a major scandal and then they would say like oh we didn't know that was happening but no so they were funding mainly in like India, China, a lot of Asia they were funding these population control programs but this is around the time that in Britain an organization called the Simon Population Trust is funded again to control the population they were looking to

find methods that would be more favorable to more conservative and religious audiences okay you know catholicism tends to teach that contraception is bad were they all right with the vasectomy no they weren't but the simon population trust thought that they might be ah like the soft cell okay yeah so they thought well this sounds better than abortions and this sounds better to conservative audiences than abortions so what we'll do is we'll start sterilization programs and they were kind of founded on the kind of global idea but they actually mainly operated in the UK and they started the first vasectomy clinic in 1967 see when you just start in these pandora boxes of madness it just goes on and on and on the first vasectomy clinic was actually being funded by like a religious interest organization

trying to control kind of mostly just overpopulation concern but yeah and the chairman of that organization was a guy called dr carlos patton blacker they've got great names if nothing else they they do they've got great names he had been the chairman of the british eugenics society in the lead up to the second world war there it is see just as you're thinking yeah and it's just all going back to eugenics isn't it yeah it was still very much based on the fact that we need to control how much the quote undesirable people wow are repopulating and are reproducing but it kind of shifted from being specifically disability based and specifically health-based and specifically criminality-based to being just more generally like people shouldn't have children unless they

can afford them. It's irresponsible to have lots of children if you don't have a really high wage, you know, that kind of attitude. So they're targeting skint testicles at this point? Yes. Nice, right, okay. Exactly. And making it more of like a social concern. So it becomes much more pervasive as a influence in society rather than saying, okay, well, we're going to put you in a prison and we're going to vasectomize you. Instead, it's much more like, should you really be having more children?

Can you afford them? More children, wow. So there's a shift in the narrative as like this is your responsibility with vasectomies about this time seen as like a good thing or were they sort of like you've been studying masculinity how does that sort of tally up with have a vasectomy and now you're no longer fertile how does like were they positive things yeah so there's a lot of conflict about this throughout especially the 60s and 70s as it's becoming more popular because on the one hand you've got people like the simon population trust who are really pushing that it is great for men to be able to

choose their fertility and everything it's also around the time of the supposed sexual revolution you know contraception's coming on the scene the pill comes into britain that kind of thing so there's more discussion about this generally and it's seen as like a progressive new masculinity or something oh okay so kind of like the pills sexually liberated you know and now you can have loads of people and not get pregnant exactly but. But then because of that, there was a lot of concerns. Well, there were concerns that men should not want a vasectomy, that they were somehow like psychopathic or sexually deviant just for wanting a vasectomy. So people argued this in parliament and stuff when it was being brought on the NHS. No, really?

That, you know, no sane man. That you must be a psychopath? Yeah, that you must have something wrong with you to agree to it. Because when you think about sort of, now there isn't really a sort of an equivalent of the vasectomy, but I suppose like a hysterectomy would be a sort of comparable, but it's a much more invasive operation. would be a sort of comparable but it's a much more invasive operation but you hear a lot about women not being able to access his or getting their tubes tied yeah without permission and doctors just won't give them one because they can't possibly know their own mind but there was an equivalent for vasectomies yeah so it was very difficult for men to get vasectomies

it was brought in with the expectation that you would only be allowed a vasectomy if you were happily married, your wife gave permission. Oh, well, oh. And you already had at least two children, but that was up to the discretion of the doctor. So sometimes they required you to have more children. I did not know that. So the qualifiers would be, you must be happily married. I'm not sure how you prove that. I think it's just that your wife agrees that you can have a vasectomy and that she's not

worried that it's going to enable you to go and cheat. Oh, clever. Sneaky. Because that was definitely a concern that kept coming up in newspapers and came up in a lot of the debates around it was, well, isn't this just going to enable men to go and cheat because they don't have to worry about getting their mistresses pregnant anymore? Because we all know that men don't cheat if there's no chance of getting anybody pregnant. Exactly. Because that's the only reason that all these men aren't cheating is that they might get people pregnant. Oh my God. Right. Okay. With these things, you can kind of see there's a straggled, weird logic to it.

The logic doesn't make any sense. It's complete bollocks. But if you follow it, you can kind of see there's a straggled, weird logic to it. Yeah. Like the logic doesn't make any sense. It's complete bollocks. But if you follow it, you can kind of see what they were... Oh my goodness. Right. So you've got to be happily married. You can't be trying to just run around like a dog with two dicks. Yeah.

Because you won't get people at the duff. That's fine. You have got to already have had children and a doctor has to have signed off on this. Yeah. Two doctors have to sign off on it because usually you has to have signed off on this yeah two doctors have to sign off on it because usually you had to get your gp's permission yeah and then they would refer you to either a general surgeon or urologist or whoever was going to do the vasectomy and they would also have to agree and when they were bringing it on the nhs there were a lot of mps

saying oh we should also have a psychiatrist opinion see you just don't hear this you hear there's a lot about when people want to get their tubes tied or have a hysterectomy but this is very much the vasectomy and this is the 60s that you said 60s 70s this is 60s 70s but right the way through like I know men now who because they're not married have been told that they can't get a vasectomy until they're into their 30s or so you know doctors won't agree they are reversible right they are reversible in most cases but it's not guaranteed and it's a much more invasive procedure and it usually isn't done on the nhs oh that's interesting yeah so you would have to pay for it to be reversed it's a much more

complicated procedure because basically the ends of the vas deferens that they've cut and usually cauterized so burned to stop them rehealing they then have to like cut them off and reattach them so it's quite fiddly so some doctors are very good at it and say that they have like 95% plus success rates. Right. But a lot of them don't have success rates that high. Okay. So it's not as reversible. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by

subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. As I just assumed that it was, I just had this idea that you could just kind of go in and present to the doctor and just be like, sort it out. And then, oh no, sorry, I made a mistake. Please reverse this. But it's not like that. I mean, a lot of men can get it reversed and have good experiences and can get their partners pregnant after that. But it's usually if you go in to get a vasectomy, the doctor says like, you need to think of this as a permanent thing. We might be able to reverse it after, but you need to think of it as permanent.

And I'm going to assume that the surgical methods have got better over time at reversing it. But in the early-ish days when people started using a vasectomy for birth control were there cases where it didn't work? Yes there were so they hadn't got quite as good at figuring out when it had worked so at the minute if you go and get a vasectomy in the weeks afterwards you will have to provide semen samples which they will check to see if they're living sperm and they say you have to use you know condoms or your partner on the pill or whatever until they can say you don't have any living sperm coming out all clear they hadn't quite realized that in the olden days in the 70s or whatever the olden everybody who lived the 70s is now going to write angry i know i'm sorry the old and old

and times the the past times and it's not true everybody they're not so distant past it's counted as late modern history so people are now turning off in their dreams sorry anyway in the 70s they hadn't quite realized that so there were quite a lot of newspaper articles that were saying, shock baby following vasectomy. Oh dear. And it was usually that the man hadn't done the testing and stuff. But my favorite one was actually not a failed vasectomy, although it was reported like it was.

It was a man went to get a vasectomy and two days later found out that his wife was pregnant with triplets oh and obviously she was pregnant already you know she didn't get pregnant in the two days after that is unfortunate so he'd have been lying there with his nuts on an ice block yeah get over the pain just as his missus turns up it's just like uh darling um some news exactly so she was already pregnant well like what happened then was there any like recompense for i mean obviously she was already pregnant but i mean if there was a failed vasectomy yeah not for her but there were other cases it was called wrongful birth cases wrongful um so that you were wrongfully born that's terrible you were wrongfully born. Oh no, that's terrible.

You were wrongfully born. There's a few different cases of these. Some in England. The most famous one was in Tayside, which is where I live at the minute. So I enjoy that. But they were cases where a couple had chosen not to have any more children. The man had got a vasectomy

and for whatever reason, the vasectomy had failed. so i think one of them was actually that the vasectomy had reversed itself after a couple of years which is very rare but can happen where the tubes like reheal themselves like wolverine testicles like you know just healing itself yeah extremely determined fertility there that is determined isn't it yeah okay but because the couple said that they hadn't been warned that this was a possibility the wife didn't realize she was pregnant like she knew something was going on but she was like no i couldn't possibly be pregnant because my husband's had a vasectomy years ago why would this be an issue so you know she completely ignored all the signs of it until

it was essentially too late for her to get an abortion if she wanted one or to have any other options so they sued the health board and also they sued the health board for quite a lot because their other children went to private school and they said well we have to send this child to private school now because it would be mean to send this child to private school now because it would be mean to not send her to private school but also we weren't expecting this expense so you should have to pay for her to go to private school and they won oh my god that's genius i don't think you could do that today but then you're all right it's your child should go to private school if the others did but you've also just had them officially labeled as a wrongful birth yeah like what does that do to a child

growing up knowing that your parents sued because they weren't meant to have you much if you were eaten you'd probably get over it i mean yes there's probably other issues going on there as well but i think the health board argued well you could have put her up for adoption from birth oh nice that's compassionate yeah um and the family were like no we're not doing that but also you should have to pay for this so yeah there's a few cases but obviously then doctors got a lot better uh warning around that you know they would like make sure that their patients knew that it might heal itself or that these things might happen so that they didn't get sure that their patients knew that it might heal itself or that these things might happen so that they didn't get sued again i wonder if that person's still

out there today presumably wandering around probably that's wow okay so is there any point where it has been vasectomies are really good i'm dead proud that i've got one this is brilliant i don't know like a vasectomy club i don't know, like a vasectomy club. I don't know. So there were vasectomy ties. Like a tie around your neck tie? No. Yeah. So... I thought you just like something you tied around your testicle for a second. Like a home DIY kit. Oh my God. Right. I'm very glad that that's not... Do not try that at home. What you mean?

No. So tell me about the ties. So this was in the mid-70s, the height of fashion. And a man who'd had a vasectomy decided to design a tie to advertise that. Wow. And this became supposedly a trend. I've only found a few newspaper articles of it. And I've not found any evidence that anyone actually wore them but there were newspaper articles about it so there were a few different tie designs go on one was just a v nice yeah one was a v with the

two legs of the v being snipped no oh no because that's like the the vast difference i've had my spermatic cord seven yeah and then one was an apple with incision lines and stitches on it and then underneath it said iofb which stood for i only fire blanks that is a statement piece. It is. They're quite striking. And this caused like a moral panic because suddenly, you know, men were supposedly buying all these and wearing them. And there were a few newspaper columnists who were concerned that men would wear these when they hadn't had a vasectomy to trick young women. Oh, that's very naughty. I was just listening to that story thinking, well, at least, you know, they're being responsible and they're kind of advertising in a weird way. Maybe it's supposed to be funny, but there are people using it just to get their

end away. Well, I don't know that anyone used it for that, but there were definitely concerns around it. So there was one newspaper writer who said that the way that some men would wear eaten ties when they hadn't gone to eaten apparently this was a thing i i don't know but apparently they would wear eaten ties or whatever when they hadn't gone there to make themselves seem posher and whatever that maybe men would wear vasectomy ties when they hadn't had a vasectomy to lure a woman. Because obviously if we saw somebody with a tie that said I'm firing blanks they'd be irresistible. Exactly they said the only contraceptive benefit of these ties would be to hold up trousers. I like that but what about so no one's doing that at least I hope that they're not doing that maybe there's something

to be said for reviving, you know, putting your own fertility status on a piece of your clothing, possibly. I'm on the pill. I think so. I would love to have, you know, some badges that are the little vasectomy symbols. There's a lot of cards.

So if you go on like online shopping places and stuff, there's a lot of vasectomy celebration cards where i guess when a man gets a vasectomy are they really and some of them say all juice no bits with an orange on them oh no oh at least people can laugh that's amazing and so you can get these today yeah you can get some of them today i have not brought back the vintage designs yet that might be a post phd project congratulations on your vasectomy oh i love that right this sounds just weird but after everything we've been talking about probably not are vasectomies still popular today like are people still having them or is the rate decreased or i mean presumably if there's a

card business behind this they must still be quite popular they are popular they have decreased since the early 2000s it's thought that some of that is because there's more options that are reversible for couples to choose so for example IUDs and stuff have become more available yeah and that means that there's less need for a permanent decision than there was before because if your only options are the pill condoms and vasectomy which is kind of what it was for a lot of the 60s 70s even 80s then yeah usually after marriage men don't want to use condoms after having a couple of children women don't want to be on the pill for another 15 years potentially until they don't need it anymore so vasectomy becomes the kind of obvious choice whereas now there's a lot more choice around IUDs injections implants that kind of stuff

so you said IUD and just for a second there I thought that was an explosive device that the that's not that's IED going to say that'd do it. When I went to get my first IUD, I said, I'm here for a UTI. I was not. She was like to get it treated or I was like, no, no, no. Like the one. The one. Oh, bless your heart.

But there is kind of like a big thing at the moment, isn't there? About the male pill and about male contraception yeah like what what's the state with that and again so the thing that i hear about that a lot and this might be completely anecdotal and unwarranted but a lot of people have propositioned the idea of like well if you were with a lover and they said don't worry i'm on the pill would that cut it for you no well that's like the vasectomy ties isn't it yes it is how much do you trust word over some sort of proof and i think that's one of the things it's invisible how do you prove that right yeah you can't prove it that's why you have a tie yeah that's why you

get a tie i wish the nhs was just giving out these ties it's like the sticker at the dentist well then you did a good job here's your tie but no so the male pill they've done a few trials of it and the problem is that it's been given quite bad mental health side effects and i think in one trial they actually had a man complete suicide oh jesus right from being on the medication and a few other men saying that they were thinking about it and that it really affected their mental health wow so i think there's kind of a narrative that like oh you know women get side effects on the pill all the time it's dangerous for women too why can't men kind of suck it up but the thing is

the female pills came in in the 60s and stuff when there wasn't as important ethics around these tests yeah whereas now it's like no if people are not surviving trials we tend to end them i didn't know that that's quite severe isn't it yeah but the narrative around it tends to be oh man can't cope with the headaches bunch of wimps yeah whereas actually there's been quite severe side effects but i do actually know someone personally who was on two of the trials and said it was the best thing ever. And after they finished, he went and got a vasectomy. Wow. Okay. Yeah. That is interesting. So even after that, he thought he'd go and get a vasectomy. Yeah, because he realized that it wasn't going to come on the market. You know, he wasn't going to be

able to get these pills after finishing the trial. No. So he said, well, I actually really enjoyed not having to think about this during the time that I was on the trial I didn't get terrible side effects or anything yeah so why wouldn't I just go and get a vasectomy then that's interesting isn't it well this has been absolutely fascinating we should probably finish by saying vasectomies are safe they are very safe they are very good choices if it's something that you want to do. A lot of doctors will do them now if you're single, if you haven't had children, that kind of thing. But sometimes it takes a little bit of, yes, I'm very sure that I want it. But yes, I have interviewed many men who are very happy with their vasectomies for this project. That is a fantastic place to leave it. but we will just say if you turn up and

your surgeon has got monkeys or guinea pigs in the back of the surgery just run unless they're therapy guinea pigs unless they're therapy guinea you could hold one to comfort you during the operation just stroking the guinea it'll be all right it'll be all right guinea pigs going if people want to find you after this and i'm sure that they will if they want to follow up on your research how can people find you i am on twitter at snip hist and saying the history of the snip so s-n-i-p-h-i-s-t that is brilliant what a fantastic handle and thank you so much it's been an absolute pleasure and horror but mostly a pleasure thank you so much for having me it's been brilliant thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure and horror, but mostly a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

It's been brilliant. Thank you. I hope that you've enjoyed joining us today, or maybe if you've not enjoyed it, that it's been educational informative for you. Thank you so much to our guest, Georgia Granger. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, give us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

In the next few weeks, we've got episodes on the study of anatomy, corsets and BDSM all coming your way. Join me again for Twix the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds. you