When he wasn’t wrestling his pet bull, slicing open the corpses of freshly hanged criminals, or studying the seasonal changes in sparrow testicles, John Hunter could be found probing the nether regions of female silk moths. The 18th-century surgeon, anatomist and all-round polymath was keen to find out if he could artificially inseminate the moths’ eggs by smearing them with male moths’ semen, using a tiny camel-hair brush. He could, and he did: eight eggs hatched successfully, in the first known example of IVF. “Thus then I ascertained,” he wrote, “that the eggs could be impregnated by art.” Emboldened by his findings, he went on to apply the same principle to humans, completing the first recorded artificial insemination in 1790, paving the way for modern fertility treatments.
