THE very first artificial insemination in the 1800s was not only an important day in the science of parenting. It was also among the darkest hours of medical ethics.

The woman who was inseminated was chloroformed without her consent and the surprising sperm donor was one of the onlooking med students – picked as he was considered the most handsome, or ‘on fleek’ as the kids might say.

Fast forward to today and there are over 70,000 fresh and frozen IVF cycles in the UK every year. But every medical advancement had to start somewhere, this one starts with knocking people out and knocking people up – without them even knowing.

Philadelphian physician William Pancoast initially thought that the issue was with his 31-year-old female patient. But after multiple examinations he believed that in fact the problem was with her husband’s low sperm count, or the fact he was ‘absolutely void of spermatozoons’ to use the official parlance recorded in the Medical World journal.

Pancoast invited his patient back and in front of six medical students knocked her out with chloroform, inseminated her with a rubber syringe, and then stuffed her cervix with gauze to keep the good stuff in.

Nine months later the woman gave birth to a baby boy, yet Pancoast had still not revealed the circumstances around the inception and the medical students present had been sworn to silence.

When he did reveal the truth he only told the husband and they both agreed it best to keep the truth about her final examination and that of the donor under wraps.

And there it stayed until 1909 when one of the medical students, Addison Davis Hard, reported it in a letter published by Medical World.

Before the letter was published, Hard reached out to the child who was now a 25-year-old businessman residing in New York, and shared with him the information regarding his conception.

Hard wrote on the medical journal: “At that time the procedure was so novel, so peculiar in its human ethics, that the six young men of the senior class who witnest [sic] the operation were pledged to absolute secrecy.”

Hard maintained that ‘artificial impregnation offers valuable advantages’, primarily by enabling the rejection of semen that lacked the ‘promise of good and healthy offspring’ in favour of ‘carefully selected seed’, albeit even if that was one of his med school pals who was watching the insemination with him.

Good to see chumocracy was alive and well in the late 1800s. Rees-Mogg would be proud.