It’s fascinating what people choose to collect as a hobby. As a kid, I collected stamps. It wasn’t much of a collection. I loved the colorful triangle stamps put out by some country named, as I recall, Tanya Touva. At least I assumed it was a country. It could have just been some guy in Nova Scotia with a printing press and a clever scheme to separate 10-year-olds from their nickels and dimes. Somewhere along the way, my stamp album and I were separated.
I also collected baseball cards – the kind that came wrapped in wax paper with a few flat pieces of very pink, very sweet-smelling bubblegum. Being the age I am, I had a bunch of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Duke Snider, rookie cards stashed away in my shoe box. One day, though, it occurred to me that my friends and I had lost interest in swapping cards with each other, so what was the point in hanging on to them? The decision made, I went outside, tossed hundreds of Yogi Berras, Bob Fellers and Ralph Kiners, into our backyard incinerator, and lit a match. Me and Nero, a pair of shmoes. Some of my chums collected comic books, some collected sea shells and arrow heads, some collected coins. When she was a girl, my wife collected paper dolls. Today, she collects ceramic pheasants. Don’t ask.
At least, unlike an odd duck named Percy Skuy, whom I recently read about, she doesn’t collect contraceptives.
The reason that Mr. Skuy got his name in the newspaper is because he had just donated his entire weird collection to the Dittrick Medical History Center, located at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland.
It seems that he began collecting these items about 40 years ago. He has traveled around the world, studying the history of contraception through the centuries, while gathering up as many different methods and devices as he could lay his hands on. It’s not always been easy. As Mr. Skuy laments, “There’s really no motivation to save an old contraceptive.” No argument there. But, then, some people would say there’s no good reason to collect ceramic pheasants.
Mr. Skuy did manage to find a prescription of sorts that was written on papyrus way back in 1550 B.C., calling for wool lint, honey, and the tips of acacia flowers. That doesn’t sound too awful. But, as with most things, it only got worse. Almost before you knew it, people were devising contraceptive methods that employed elephant dung, knotted fishing lines, and that old standby, mule’s earwax. In olden days, Chinese women went so far as to drink mercury as a means of birth control. But, I suppose if you’ve spent enough time around teenagers, you’ll even risk death to avoid having them hanging around the house.
In 17 th century India, women ate carrot seeds, but, judging by India today, that only depleted the population of carrots, not people.
In certain parts of Canada, even in these enlightened times, Skuy insists that some women steep dried beaver testicles in alcohol and then drink the vile concoction. Frankly, I think it’s just the mere thought of what the ladies have been up to that keeps the men safely at bay. Or, then again, it might very well be their breath. According to Mr. Skuy, young Australian males have been known to use candy wrappers as condoms. One can only hope they weren’t Baby Ruths.
He even tells of an English woman who used the top of a teapot as a diaphragm! Thank heaven he refrains from telling us how she used the bottom half. After I tried skiing a few times and got sick and tired of dealing with boots, skis, poles and t-bars, all while freezing my tail off, I observed that if sex were half as much trouble as skiing, nobody would ever bother with it.
However, judging by Mr. Skuy’s collectibles, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Elephant dung?! Teapot lids?! Beaver testicles?! Sometimes, I get the idea that God didn’t create human sexuality for the propagation of the species, but merely for His own amusement.
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©2004 Burt Prelutsky
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