On this date in 1800, Charles Knowlton was born in Templeton, Mass., to Stephen and Comfort (White) Knowlton. He earned his M.D. from Dartmouth College in 1824. As a student, Knowlton was jailed for two months for exhuming and dissecting a corpse for anatomical studies. Freethinkers like Knowlton pioneered the movement to prevent unwanted pregnancies and he was one of the earliest reformers.
His Fruits of Philosophy; or, the Private Companion of Young Married People (1832) tackled the subject of birth control before that term existed. Knowlton dispassionately made the case for preventing conception and promoted a syringe-administered douche. The first edition was anonymous. The book was published in nine U.S. editions and was reprinted by subscription by a group of doctors at Harvard Medical School in 1877. Knowlton was prosecuted and sentenced to three months’ hard labor when it became known he was the author.
Upon release he went to a freethought society in Boston run by Abner Kneeland, where he delivered “Two Remarkable Lectures” referring to superstition as the “moral monster.” He was unsuccessfully prosecuted in Greenfield, Mass., at the instigation of a minister. British atheists Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant republished Fruits of Philosopy in 1877 to challenge the Obscene Publications Act. They were prosecuted and tried, narrowly avoiding jail. Besant rewrote the dated text into Law of Population in 1879, which became a best-seller and helped hasten the birth control movement worldwide.
Knowlton was a delegate to the convention of the Infidels of the United States in New York City in 1845. He died in 1850.
