LeBron may be gone and the Cuyahoga River no longer catches on
fire but Cleveland still has Dennis Kucinich, the Rock & Roll
Hall of Fame and something even most Clevelanders will find
surprising: America’s only exhibition of contraceptives. Tucked
away in the halls of the Dittrick Medical History Center at Case
Western Reserve University, is a collection of beaver testicles,
cat bones, crocodile dung, ear wax from a mule, spider and deer
skin, Mexican yams, formaldehyde powder, Goodyear Tire rubbers,
rhythm beads, seed wool, dates, honey, sponges, diaphragms,
loops, pills and IUDs, all displayed in a chronological tribute
to women’s attempts to control their fertility over the past
1,000-plus years. “People used all kinds of things and they’ve
been doing this forever,” says Jimmy Wilkinson Meyer, guest
curator of “Virtue, Vice, and Contraband: A History of
Contraception in America” at the Dittrick Center. “The oldest
mention of contraception is in an Egyptian papyrus scroll from
1550 BC,” which describes a p