The ultimate choice of Puerto Rico as the testing ground was shaped by a complex set of factors which illustrates the ways in which the development of new medical technologies takes place. Medical innovation requires the creation of contexts to establish the required links between the technology-in — the-making and its new audiences and consumers. […]

After Margaret Sanger’s visit, Pincus began the search for the “universal contraceptive.” In 1951, he took up the line of research that Makepeace and his colleagues had initiated in 1937: the effects of progesterone on ovulation. As a first step, Pincus had two of his staff members, the chemist Min-Chueh Chang and the biologist Anne […]

When scientists took up the testing of hormones as contraceptives in the early 1950s, it was not an entirely new topic on their research agenda. The possible use of hormones as agents to control fertility was mentioned as early as the 1920s. The first publication mentioning hormonal contraceptives can be traced back to Austria. In […]

Most people today will associate hormones with the pill. Hormonal contraceptives are indeed the most powerful outcome of the introduction of the concept of the hormonal body in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the possibility of using hormones as contraceptives was mentioned as early as 1921, it took three decades before scientists actually began to […]

In the original theory, sex hormones were conceptualized as chemical agents that were strictly sex specific in origin and function. Following this conceptualization laboratory scientists, pharmaceutical companies and gynecologists made two types of sex hormones: male and female. As we saw in Chapter 2, the sexual specificity of sex hormones became a topic of debate […]

In contrast to female sex hormones, the marketing of male sex hormones was not immediately successful. In 1931 Laqueur complained that the selling of Hombreol did not show any progress and advised Organon to supply free preparations to leading Dutch general practitioners. The reason for the disappointing sales was sought in the poor quality of […]

77 NEWMAN STREET, LONDON, W. l Temporary Address: 22 Parkwood Avenu*. Esher. Telephone: Emberbrook 4058 Figure 5.3 Advertisement for Neo-Hombreol in The Lancet that was not used in the promotion campaign for male sex hormones in The Netherlands. hormones in its endeavor to become accepted as a science-based industry. In this process, early claims in […]

Although much criticized, the early experiences with testes preparations also suggested another application of male sex hormones: the treatment of sexual disorders, like impotence and loss of libido, in particular in elderly men (Organon Archive 13 February 1931). This indication is also described as the climacterium virile, the male menopause.25 Organon did not, however, put […]

Early expectations and clinical trials The first standardized preparation of male sex hormones was not put on the market by Organon until 1931, five years after the equivalent drug for women. Since 1924, Organon had been marketing an organ preparation made from testes (Testanon), but it was not standardized by biological tests. The relative delay […]

Reflecting on the wide range of medical indications for female sex hormone therapy, it is striking that hormonal control of reproduction did not develop into one of the therapeutic uses of female sex hormones until the 1950s. This is even more remarkable if one considers the fact that female sex hormones were applied as a […]