B. Franklin Update

 

Garden angelica as depicted in Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, 1887, via Wikipedia

I was telling you how Benjamin Franklin, at the tender age of 23, was making fun of his ex-employer Samuel Keimer for accidentally publishing a kind of guide to self-induced abortions in his Philadelphia newspaper. 

A wonderful discovery from Molly Farrell at Slate is that 19 years later, in 1748, he published such a guide himelf, in all seriousness, as a public service, by tacking the Virginian John Tennent's The Poor Planter's Physician onto his pirate edition of a popular British how-to manual, The Instructor; Tennent's treatise included advice on how to deal with a missed period, the "suppression of the courses", a "common Complaint among unmarry'd Women", by treating it (a week before you "expect" to be missing it!) with angelica, also known as "bellyache root":

Franklin’s choice to get Tennent’s pamphlet into the hands of readers all over the colonies meant that anyone learning to read, write, and calculate with his book would also have access to the leading available treatment for ending a pregnancy. Tennent’s handbook prescribes angelica, an herb known to be an effective abortifacient in the early stages of pregnancy for thousands of years, and which was frequently recommended across early modern herbal books.* Moreover, the recipe refers to several herbal abortifacients known at the time:

For this Misfortune, you must purge with Highland Flagg, (commonly called Bellyach Root) a Week before you expect to be out of Order; and repeat the same two Days after; the next Morning drink a Quarter of Pint of Pennyroyal Water, or Decoction, with 12 Drops of Spirits of Harts-horn, and as much again at Night, when you go to Bed. Continue this 9 Days running; and after resting 3 Days, go on with it for 9 more.

Farrell connects the publication with Franklin's lifelong promotion of education for girl and women, especially in math (which was the main subject of The Instructor), as well as with the further evidence contra Alito of how "deeply rooted" abortion rights were in "our history and traditions" if your world was a world in which women had some autonomy . It's a lovely piece, with an illustration so good I don't want to steal it, just go read it.

Opinions We Never Finished Reading. IV

Meanwhile, beyond the grim world of the witch killers Coke and Hale, there's evidence of more relaxed attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, in some places that you might not expect at all. 

For instance, in 1729, around the same time as the prosecution of Eleanor Beare, a brand new newspaper, the Philadelphia Gazette, published by Samuel Keimer, was running a series of articles, presumably pirated, from a new English reference work, Chambers' Cyclopaedia, in alphabetical order, and apparently not paying enough attention to what he was issuing. It included a lengthy discussion of Abortion in the fifth number, which had been okay in a bound volume in England, but too explicit for the comfort of an American newspaper audience, reading a little like a how-to manual:

Anyway, none other than that first fearless American comedian-blogger, Benjamin Franklin, had a number of grudges against Keimer, who had given him his first job when he came to Philadelphia as a 17-year-old in 1723, and undercut his own plan to start a newspaper by founding the Gazette at the end of 1728. Franklin and some friends really intended to drive Keimer out of business, in a series of  satirical opinion columns published under the nym "The Busy-Body", in Andrew Bradford's American Weekly Mercury. He began, however, by mocking Keimer over the abortion article, in the following bogus letters to the editor of the Mercury:

Vast dark forest

Update July 16 2013:
Welcome IHateNYT fans! Make yourselves at home. There's something here about most David Brooks columns over the past year or so, so Brooks obsessives and Brooksologists might want to linger.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Socrate arrachant Alcibiade du sein de la Volupté, 1791. Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks:

A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third.

Humanities Resource Center Online

The national figures are actually for a short half century, 1966 to 2010, and with some sketchy rounding,  from Wall Street Journal, June 6, which got them from Harvard. They originally come from the National Center for Education Statistics, see chart above; note that the decline was actually finished by 1982: you could just as well say the proportion has gone up by 20% over the last 30 years, meaning the entire argument that follows is practically irrelevant to the present moment. [jump]