It's Always More Complicated

I do wonder, given the way people think that there is some Natural Way Of Childbirth that awful modern life has overridden and they need to get back to (yes, screaming), whether there is a similar kind of myth about the potent sperm of Men In The Past?

‘Spermageddon’: is the world facing a male reproductive crisis?

It's not just thinking of the levels of various kinds of STIs swilling around, it's the effects of all sorts of other diseases (MUMPS, for instance), and if you are going to going WO WO about chemicals and pollution, I think you might give some thought to the kinds of exposure to chemicals going on in unregulated workplaces, the pollution that generated the Smoke Abatement Society in 1890s, all of which we feel probably had some effect on the male reproductive system even before they started chugging those remedies full of arsenic, strychnine, etc, to boost their manliness.

Fifty springs are little room to make a definitive argument about changes in male reproductivity.

And on boosting MANLINESS, I was thoroughly boggled at this guy who was actually injecting GOLD, which honestly sounds like Ye Olde Alchemy, no?

Though those of us who read The Nun's Story may recall that she was given gold treatment for her TB, but it was very carefully managed.

I also read a murder mystery once in which the method was poisoning by gold (I think actually by some doc or pharmacist's leftover vials from that era) by an author who had form for unusual mostly poison methods (and not a lot of human interest).