In recent years dna diagnosis has become a rapidly developing field: more and more syndromes are being shown to be genetically deter­mined and in a number of diseases it has become clear that a small part of the chromosome, the gene, is not functioning properly. An example of this is cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder […]

In about 20 per cent of men with fewer than 20 million sperm cells per millimetre a genetic abnormality is found. A genetic investigation is called for if during a physical examination abnormalities are found which might be consonant with a genetic disorder (for example, the absence of seminal ducts or certain genetic disorders occurring […]

In the microscopic examination of sperm one looks, for example, at the number of sperm cells, their mobility and their shape. The volume of the sperm sample and the degree of acidity are also recorded. It is important that there should have been no ejaculation for three days: research has shown that that is when […]

According to the who one can speak of reduced fertility where no con­ception has occurred after one year of frequent and unprotected inter­course. It is not completely clear what is meant by frequent. Eels mate once in their lives, taking a long time to become sexually mature. Many of these fish are over eighteen years […]

In the early 1990s researchers at the University of Copenhagen analysed the scientific literature that had appeared between 1938 and 1991 onthe quality of sperm, which had involved 15,000 men. They found that in 1940 the average number of spermatozoa per millilitre of seminal fluid was 116 million. By 1990 that had fallen to 66 […]

In 1888 Bernhard Bardenheuer (1839-1913), a German surgeon who specialized in genito-urinary surgery, was the first to try to connect the seminal duct and the testicle in a man whose epipidymis had been removed because of tuberculosis, and in 1934 a thorough survey of all attempts made up to then was published by the German […]

From the very beginning the occurrence of spontaneous recanalization, the growing together of the severed ends of the seminal ducts, has been one of the main problems associated with vasectomy. As long ago as the 1950s it became clear that if one simply tied off the seminal duct there was virtually always recanalization, and even […]

In the 1970s a large-scale programme was launched by the World Health Organization in India and elsewhere to combat over-popula­tion, in which millions of men were sterilized. The same happened in China under government pressure. For some decades Chinese doctors had already been using alternatives to vasectomy, including a technique requiring only three instruments (an […]

Forced sterilization The controversial history of sterilization in men, vasectomy, begins with Cooper’s publication of 1832 on the severing of the seminal duct in dogs. The first sterilization was carried out in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century in order to prevent the spread of crime. There was a fear that […]

In 1870 an American orthopaedic surgeon launched the notion that a whole range of ailments, rheumatism, asthma, kidney infections, bed­wetting, alcoholism, sterility and venereal disease, could be cured by circumcision. Sayre, the surgeon concerned, was acclaimed as the ‘Columbus of the foreskin’. At the beginning of the twentieth century an American magazine hypothesized that the […]