pill / the pill

Dave Wilton

08 Apr 2024 • 4 min read

A pill is a tablet or other such mass containing a drug intended to be swallowed. The pill is an oral contraceptive. The definite article underscores the revolutionary nature of reliable oral contraception. With the pill, women for the first time could exercise their reproductive autonomy, opening up opportunities in higher education and careers that unplanned pregnancies would otherwise prevent. It quite literally changed society.

The English word pill ultimately comes from the Latin pilula, meaning little ball or pellet. The exact route into English, however, is unknown. It could be a borrowing directly from Latin and subsequent clipping. It could be from the Middle French pillule, the Middle Dutch pille, the Middle High German pille, or some combination of any or all of these.

The first known appearance in English is in a translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s Chirugia Magna, a treatise on surgery and medical techniques. The translation dates to some time before the year 1400. The section of Lanfranc’s book about treating cataracts has this:

Þe patient mote absteine him fro sopers & fro al maner fruitis þat engendriþ moistnes saue he schal vse hote þingis, & he schal ofte be purgid wiþ pillis cochie rasis; þat is þe beste þing laxatif þat mai be for iȝen.

(The patient must abstain from dinners and from all manner of fruits that engender moistness, save he shall use hot things, and he shall often be purged with cochie rasis pills; that is the best laxative that there is for the eyes.)

Exactly what cochie rasis is isn’t known; rasis would indicate it is some kind of resin. And in this case laxative probably has nothing to do with the bowels but is rather used more generally to refer to a substance that causes the body to expel bad humors, in this case perhaps through tears.

Pills have been used in anglophone medicine ever since. But the pill (often capitalized, the Pill, especially in early use) refers to an oral contraceptive. The earliest use of pill in this sense that I have found is from a United Press syndicated story of 7 November 1950. Note that the use of pill here is still generic, a pill, not yet the pill:

Stone said the pill or injection method might render a woman incapable of conceiving a child for a period of several month at a time, but would not later interfere with fertility when conception was desired.

We see this transitional, and rhyming, use of the pill in a 21 October 1956 piece in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch. It’s not clear whether this is actually a use of the pill or it’s just constructed to be parallel with the will:

Much of the talk about the “P[opulation]-bomb”, has inevitably led to discussion of simple, easy-to-use and effective birth control measure, perhaps in the form of a pill.

But, Cook believes, “you have got to have the will to go along with the pill” in controlling the size of families.

But the following year, 1957, we get an unambiguous use of the Pill, which appears in the book The Human Sum, edited by C. H. Rolph:

Dr. A. S. Parkes, of the Medical Research Council, examines the possibilities of producing “controlled temporary infertility without undesirable side-effects.” He gives a modestly exciting account of the quest now going on, in biological laboratories in various parts of the world, for what laymen like myself insist on calling “the Pill”; and by this phrase, which, like all men of science, Dr. Parkes would doubtless reject, I mean the simple and completely reliable contraceptive taken by mouth.

1957 is the year when oral contraceptives for women went on the market in the United States. An oral contraceptive for men, however, has continued to be an elusive goal for researchers. We get the first reference to the male pill in a 21 April 1961 article in the Los Angeles Times. I quote the article at some length because it makes some interesting observations and assumptions. First is the accurate (so far) prediction that the quest for a male pill may never come to fruition. Another is the question of whether or not men would use it—women have a lot more at stake when it comes to being assured that their contraception works. (Not to mention that they would have to trust the man when he says he is on the pill.)

A pilot study to determine the efficiency and long-term effects of a new oral contraceptive pill for men has been under way in Los Angeles for the past 10 months.

In an exclusive interview with the physician conducting the tests, the Times learned the pills of the type being studied appear to have most of the characteristics of an ideal contraceptive.

But, he said, it may be years before the pill is released for general use—if it ever is.

The pill probably would be preferable to the recently marketed oral contraceptive for women, provided men would be willing to take it, said Dr. Henry J. Olsen.

[…]

Dr. Olsen, who is clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA Medical School, said the male pill must be taken daily for as long a time as infertility is desired.

Sources:

Bundschu, Barbara (United Press). “Birth Control Pill May be Available in Five Years.” Cincinnati Post, 7 November 1950, 22/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Diamond, Edwin (INS). “Population Rise Held Dangerous.” Columbus Dispatch, 21 October 1956, 22A/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie.” Early English Text Society, O.S. 102. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894, 250. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1396.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. pille, n.

Nelson, Harry. “Contraceptive Pills for Men Being Tested Here; 30 Subjects in Study.” Los Angeles Times, 21 April 1961, B1/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. pill, n.3.; June 2000, male pill, n.

Rolph, C. H., ed. The Human Sum. New York: MacMillan, 1957, 6.

Photo credit: BetteDavisEyes, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.