The Journal of Interdisciplinary History ; 52 2 : — Although fertility has traditionally been viewed as the responsibility of women, recent studies suggest that reduced sperm function is a major cause of the recurrent pregnancy loss that affects 1 to 2 percent of couples.
The reproductive and nutritional history of King Henry VIII indicates that 70 percent of the legitimate pregnancies attributed to Henry and his six wives resulted in miscarriage or stillbirth.
By comparison, only 10 percent of the recorded pregnancies of the thirty-one noblemen closely associated with Henry had the same outcomes. Societies throughout the world have traditionally viewed the production of healthy children as the responsibility of women. Henry is well-known for having married six times in his desperate quest for a son, disposing of wives who did not fulfill their royal and marital duty. Henry fathered three legitimate children—Mary I, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I—but what is less well-known is the significant number of unsuccessful pregnancies with which he was associated.
Only two surviving daughters Mary and Elizabeth reached maturity; his son Edward died at age fifteen. Henry, naturally for a monarch of this era, accused his wives. The understanding at this time that men as well as women could suffer from problems of infertility was tentative and unlikely to have been countenanced by a Tudor monarch.
Suffice it to say that it was usually, but not always, confined to an inability to perform. Witness, for example, the late fourteenth-century treatise by John of Mirfield, St.
Male infertility was not recognized as a significant issue until the early modern period, roughly around the turn of the seventeenth century. Unfortunately for his wives, Henry was blissfully unaware that, as demonstrated by recent research, some men, particularly those with sperm deficiencies, may not only have a significant effect on pregnancy but also potentially be the cause of miscarriage and stillbirth.
Identifiable reasons for miscarriage are not always easy or even possible to determine, but increasingly moving attention from women to men has recently led to investigations into male chromosomes, dna , and lifestyle choices, such as diet and exercise.
Male infertility reduced sperm function currently affects half of all couples seeking fertility treatment, and global sperm counts are reported to have halved since the s. Recent studies highlight that damaged sperm from men may be the reason why women suffer repeated miscarriages. Factors impairing male fertility, such as semen oxidative stress and sperm dna fragmentation, are normally elevated in male partners of women with rpl when compared with other men.
Currently, the only approved therapy for affected couples with male infertility is assisted reproductive technology art , such as in-vitro fertilization therapy ivf or intracytoplasmic sperm injection icsi. However, only a minority of health-care systems and couples worldwide can afford the high costs of art , and only limited research has been performed in recent decades on the development of novel therapies for couples with male infertility.
Due to the historical idea that producing healthy children is the exclusive responsibility of women, male infertility remains an emasculating condition carrying a powerful social stigma, which often impairs the ability of men and their partners to seek appropriate support.
An exploration of the historical background of male infertility helps to challenge the image of male infertility as a condition of weakness in affected men. This interdisciplinary article provides the first detailed investigation of miscarriage rates before the modern era that centers on males. It uses historical records to document miscarriage rates among a sample of noblemen, including Henry VIII, and their wives in Tudor England during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.
Most importantly, the records of the Tudor Royal household for banquets, kitchens, and dining provide information about his diet. Records of pregnancies and births permit the calculation of miscarriage rates for individual couples and further analysis of the descriptive statistics. Having become just the second monarch of a shaky new dynasty at the age of seventeen in , Henry VIII was obsessed with producing a healthy male heir.
Table 1 lists his wives, children, and failed pregnancies, so far as known. Catherine fell pregnant regularly within the first ten years of the marriage; the announcement of her first pregnancy occurred just two months after the wedding when she was twenty-four. A healthy child Mary was not produced until , seven years after the marriage, at a time when Henry was emphasizing his sexual prowess epitomized by the size of his codpieces and trying to produce a male heir.
He banished her from court and annulled the marriage in He bragged heartily about his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, — , showering him with titles and honors from the age of six.
Blount had six more children with two husbands after Henry, all of whom lived to maturity. In spite of the birth of his daughter Mary and that of an illegitimate son, Henry never questioned his own fertility, apparently to save face and protect a conviction about his own virility, and he could always fall back on the curse of Leviticus dating to his marriage with Catherine. The birth of a girl, Elizabeth, in September was a disappointment, but at least it proved Anne to be fertile.
Miscarriages followed in and Anne Boleyn, her brother, and four others were executed a few days later in May She swiftly became pregnant but died in of complications following the birth of Edward VI on October 12, Can the finger point to Henry as the common factor and cause of his own misfortune?
The fact that Henry was responsible for at least eleven known pregnancies including the birth of Henry Fitzroy from to and from to might bode well for his fertility and fitness. But, in fact, his many failures with different partners could well suggest otherwise. The loss of five sons must have weighed heavily. As he lamented, why could he not produce a child when the least of his subjects could?
Old age undoubtedly contributes to infertility. Other risk factors contributing to it, of which Henry and his physicians would not have been aware, are stress, lack of exercise, obesity, and illness.
Lifestyle choices linked to weight, diet, nutrition, alcohol intake, medication, and drug use affect sperm viability and thus have a significant effect on the health of a pregnancy. Like a complete lack of exercise, highly intense, competitive-level training may also decrease sperm health. As a young man, Henry favored hunting, jousting, and other high-impact sports of his era. On many occasions, he suffered severe wounds, and in and , he narrowly escaped being killed.
Edward IV, his maternal grandfather, had fifteen children, ten legitimate and five illegitimate. Henry VII was an only child, since his father died when he was twenty-six, leaving a pregnant thirteen-year-old widow, Margaret Beaufort, who had no further children from subsequent marriages.
Catherine was one of eight siblings, six of whom reached maturity, and her father also had many confirmed illegitimate children. Likewise, Anne Boleyn was one of five siblings. Her paternal grandfather had ten children; all but one lived to maturity. Her mother was one of seventeen siblings and step-siblings. In his youth, he was a strapping sport enthusiast with a muscular build and a forty-two-inch chest. By his thirties, however, Henry had become grossly overweight.
A recent meta-analysis identified obesity as strongly associated with poor sperm quality in men; Henry VIII was almost certainly morbidly obese with a body mass index bmi of Although, as king, Henry would have had access to the best food, medical care, and sanitation, he would also have suffered from poor nutrition.
It was almost bereft of the vegetables and pulses beans, peas, and lentils, which were considered to be peasant food that supply vitamins and fiber. Fruit was included on menus but normally cooked or crystallized with sugar; fresh fruit was thought to cause fever.
But the luxury of the court was fresh meat. Tudor courtiers enjoyed a wide variety of food, with freshly slaughtered, roasted meat every day. Figure 3 displays a typical menu, as recorded in the Ordinances for Eltham Palace. At Hampton Court, about meals were prepared twice a day.
Even when he ate alone in his chamber, as he often did, Henry chose from a huge buffet of meats roasted or served in pies , followed by sweet preserves. Not surprisingly, even in his youth but increasingly as he aged, Henry had a seriously compromised diet, over-rich in protein and almost completely lacking in vitamins. Given his probable genetic heritage, his increasingly unhealthy diet, and possible injuries from his active years, Henry seems likely to have suffered from damage to sperm dna fragmentation.
Hence, the consistent problems with miscarriage and stillbirth probably originated with him. The extent to which the fertility problems experienced by Henry and his wives were abnormal for his era is evident in an investigation of other contemporary couples with social backgrounds similar to those of Henry and his wives.
Data about miscarriages and neonatal deaths for nobles may not have been as carefully recorded as those for royals, but the success rates the survival of children past the age of about two are capable of reasonable estimation. The study is restricted to children born within marriage due to the lack of consistent data about illegitimate pregnancies; early methods of contraception are irrelevant in these cases since the production of heirs in both royal and noble families was paramount.
The eminent Howard and Seymour families which both supplied Henry with a wife serve as prime examples, as can other known courtiers and colleagues of Henry for whom detailed information is available. Results show that among thirty-one noblemen closely associated with Henry, the mean number of children fathered was 5.
Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk — , uncle and judge of Anne Boleyn, who was one of sixteen siblings and step-siblings, produced eight children from two wives. Edward Seymour, first duke of Somerset — had twelve children by two wives one baby died in infancy. According to column 4 of Table 2 , even if the records of the miscarriages and stillbirths of courtiers are incomplete, and their illegitimate births unrecorded, Henry undeniably produced far fewer offspring than did his contemporaries, in spite of his multiple partners.
Furthermore, early death or late marriage are ready explanations for why some of his contemporaries had few documented children; infertility was not the issue for them. As already mentioned, male reproductive failure throughout history has usually been attributed to a lack of sexual prowess or impotence; the ridicule that affected men feared that they might receive for sexual inadequacy resulted in a taboo on any discussion of the subject.
The ability of a man to perform removed any doubt about his fertility, leaving reproductive failure exclusively as the fault of women. In the sixteenth century, dramatic medical progress ensued after the legalization of human dissection for anatomical purposes, the revival of work by the Roman physician Galen, and the new ideas of Vesalius.
But as Evans highlights, not until the seventeenth century did the first detailed discussions and descriptions of male infertility emerge in England, particularly by the surgeon John Tanner in his The Hidden Treasures of the Art of Physick Tanner still regarded the role of women in pregnancy failure as dominant, but he addressed male infertility as distinct from erectile function, thus initiating the recognition of male infertility as a condition requiring identification and treatment.
The risk of poor nutrition in matters of fertility is no secret nowadays, whether in several developing countries with some conditions not unlike those of sixteenth-century England or anywhere else where people indulge in excessive meat and carbohydrate intake and avoid fruits, legumes, and vegetables.
Obesity, physical infirmity, diabetes, and sexually transmitted infections can reduce the quality of sperm, either blocking pregnancy or auto-aborting it; malnutrition, poor sanitation, and infections can lead to foetal or neonatal death.
Poor sperm quality is an especially under-appreciated cause of miscarriage in contemporary times. Before joining ACI, Ashley worked in the federal sector as a technology analyst. In this role, Ashley defined and improved processes, while playing a key role in change management and problem management.
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