← Back to the front page

The Death Row Baseball Team and Other Odd Episodes in History

Khalid Elhassan May 18, 2020 34 min

Death Row All Stars: A Story of Baseball, Corruption, and Murder - State Penitentiary — Alston's All Stars. Daily Mail

23. Crocodile Poop Contraceptives

The ancient Egyptians’ use of medicinal fly dung raises a fascinating question: just how did they, long before microscopes were invented, even manage to spot, let alone gather, tiny fly turds? The ancient Greeks borrowed a lot from the Egyptians, including the medical prescription for using crocodile poop as birth control.

Ancient Greek women believed that inserting crocodile dung in their vaginas would serve as a powerful contraceptive. For all we know, it might have actually worked. At least in the sense that encountering a vagina full of crocodile poop might have been such a huge turn-off that it prevented sex from occurring in the first place.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.