Written records of birth control methods survive from ancient times. Methods are mentioned among the various formulas and remedies recorded in the Ebers papyrus, a compilation of Egyptian medical texts dating from 1550 bce. Classical writers, including Pliny the Elder, Pedanius Dioscorides (De materia medica, c. 77 ce), and Soranus of Ephesus (On Midwifery and the Diseases of Women, c. 100 ce), refer to contraception and abortion. Several authors from the flowering of Arabic medicine in the 10th century mention contraception, notably al-Rāzī (Rhazes; Quintessence of Experience), Ali ibn Abbas (The Royal Book), and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā; The Canon of Medicine). The methods recommended by these early commentators fall into three groups: the reasonable but probably ineffective, such as wiping out the vagina after intercourse (Soranus); the reasonable and perhaps effective, such as using honey, alum, or lactic acid as spermicidal barriers (Ebers papyrus, Dioscorides, and Soranus); and the mystical and manifestly ineffective, for example suggesting that the woman jump backward seven times immediately after coitus (Soranus).

By 1900 all the methods of birth control now in use, with the exception of oral contraceptives, were understood and available in Europe and North America. The first to be developed was the condom. Folklore attributes the invention to a Dr. Condom, said to have been alarmed by the number of illegitimate offspring of Charles II of England. It is more likely, however, that the name derives from the Latin condus, for receptacle. The earliest published description is by Italian anatomist Gabriel Fallopius in 1564. The first condoms were made from animal intestines and for the most part were used to prevent sexual transmission of disease. When Charles Goodyear discovered the process for vulcanization of rubber in 1839 he initiated a revolution in contraception, as well as transport, and condoms have been a popular choice for birth control since the second half of the 19th century. The use of vaginal barriers (diaphragms and caps, which are commonly used with spermicides) was recorded by German physician F.A. Wilde in 1823. The medical forerunner of the intrauterine device was the stem pessary, first described and illustrated in 1868. By 1909, Richard Richter, a practitioner from near Breslau (Wrocław in present-day Poland), had described most of the advantages and disadvantages of this method of birth control. Vasectomy, or male sterilization, was practiced in the 19th century, and the first female sterilization by surgical occlusion of the fallopian tubes was performed by a surgeon in Ohio in the United States in 1881. The surgical techniques of induced abortion in use today were also known in the 19th century. In the 1860s an Edinburgh gynecologist, James Young Simpson, described a procedure for “dry cupping” the uterus. The procedure adumbrated vacuum aspiration, a method commonly used today for performing legal abortion.

The fact that conception was more likely to take place during certain phases of the menstrual cycle than others was suspected by classical authors. Adam Raciborski, a Paris physician, noted in 1843 that brides married soon after their menstruation often conceived in that cycle, while if the wedding occurred later in the cycle they commonly had another period before pregnancy occurred. Hermann Knaus in Austria (1929) and Kyūsaku Ogino in Japan (1930) independently and correctly concluded that ovulation occurs 14 days prior to the next menstruation. In 1964 an Australian medical team, John and Evelyn Billings, showed how women could monitor changes in their cervical mucus and learn to predict when ovulation would occur.

“The greatest invention some benefactor can give mankind,” wrote Sigmund Freud in the early years of the 20th century, “is a form of contraception which does not induce neurosis.” Many of the elements to meet the goal of a new, more acceptable form of contraception were present about the time of World War I, yet two generations were to reach maturity before those elements were exploited. The role of hormones from the ovary was understood early in the 20th century by Walter Heape and John Marshall. The first extract of estrogen was produced in 1913, and the pure compound was isolated by the Americans Willard Allen and Alan Doisy in 1923. At this time an Austrian physiologist, Ludwig Haberlandt, was carrying out experiments on rabbits to apply the new-found knowledge of hormones for contraceptive ends. By 1927 he was able to write, “It needs no amplification, of all methods available, hormonal sterilization based on biologic principles, if it can be applied unobjectionably in the human, is an ideal method for practical medicine and its future task of birth control.” Hostile public attitudes made research on birth control virtually impossible, however, and Haberlandt’s ideal was not realized until the 1960s.