Nand Peeters

Unless otherwise indicated, all information in this article is based on Van den Broeck 2014. A great deal of information in English can be found in Van den Broeck, Janssens & Defoort 2012 (an article in a peer-reviewed journal) and in Hope 2010. German publications are Albach 1993 [in particular pp. 922–999, “Case F: Die Entwicklung der «Pille» (Oral Contraceptives)”] and Sieg 1996.

In 1953, also in Turnhout, he founded the Saint-Elisabeth nursing school, where he taught for free. Naturally the school provided him with well-trained nursing staff, whom he entrusted with far greater responsibilities than was customary at the time. He retired in 1986. An intracranial hemorrhage in 1988 ended his active life—communication became impossible. He lived another ten years, dying on December 27, 1998.

The Catholic Church’s ban on artificial birth control as well as the political situation in Turnhout left him no choice but to withdraw into silence. This he did so successfully that his own children knew only vaguely that he had had something to do with Anovlar. That it was he who actually developed it they discovered only in 1995, when Schering, unaware of Peeters’s medical condition, asked him for help in contributing to the eponymous catalog (Staupe & Vieth 1996) of Die Pille: Von der Lust und von der Liebe, an exhibition put on by the German Hygiene Museum.

But in his own country, Peeters faced problems. Until 1973, publications on birth control were liable to fall foul of Belgian law, which considered them obscene. In Belgium, Peeters had to keep quiet about his work.

Peeters never accepted his church’s absolute prohibition of the pill. He never repudiated his work on Anovlar. On the contrary, he was quietly proud of it. When he was asked to contribute an article on himself in a Dutch version of Who’s Who, he cited just one publication, Peeters 1970, his Dutch adaptation of a German work on hormone treatment, intended for doctors. He wanted them to continue to use hormones, including Anovlar, which he discussed in this book without mentioning his role in its development. And he continued to do research, not only on Anovlar, but also on other pills, such as Eugynon, Aconcen and Sequilar. However, he published his results only in medical journals.

When Paul VI confirmed the church’s total rejection of birth control by “artificial methods” in his Humanae vitae in 1968, Peeters was greatly disappointed and angry. But he was a devout and committed catholic, and he could not square it with his conscience to publicly distance himself from the teaching of the church.

In 1964, Ortho Pharmaceutical asked Peeters to participate in a clinical trial of a variant of RhoGAM, its Rho(D) immune globulin. He accepted. Peeters took the lead of a small team of doctors and a great number of midwives, whom he alerted to the problem of Rh-disease and who, aware of his excellent reputation in the region, willingly cooperated. The medication was tested on more than 700 women, and the trial was a resounding success: not a single case of Rh-disease was reported, leading one of his colleagues to say that it made the Campine the first Rh-disease free region in the world. When he presented the results to a Berlin conference attended by over 2500 gynecologists and pediatricians, it turned out that his was by far the most extensive clinical trial. But he ascribed its success to the midwives and the maternities involved in the study, and he did not even publish his results. He was too busy lecturing and teaching refresher courses to doctors.

However, since October 1958, John XXIII was pope, and Aggiornamento seemed possible, even in his church’s view on birth control. Nand Peeters thought so. On May 1, 1963, he was granted a short private audience with John XXIII, from which he came away with the impression “that the pope provided support for the pill”. At any rate, in 1963 John XXIII established the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, which continued its work under the aegis of pope Paul VI, though in a much expanded composition. In 1964, Paul VI convened the First European Congress of Catholic Doctors (Malta, 1964), which was almost entirely devoted to birth control. Peeters was one of the speakers.

But Schering hesitated to introduce it in Germany, fearing comparison with Nazi eugenics, still a painful memory in that country. It was first introduced in Australia, in February 1961, as “Anovlar”, a name intended to mean ‘without ovulation’. The following table shows Anovlar’s introduction times in a number of countries:

He addressed the Third World Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics (Vienna, September 1961) and the 60th Congress of the North-West-German Gynecological Society (Kiel, 1961). He also spoke at the Second Fertility Congress in Brussels, where he met with Eleanor Mears, co-author of a highly favorable report of a large-scale clinical trial of Anovlar, published in the prestigious BMJ.

The results of Peeters’s research were published as Peeters F., M. Van Roy & R. Oeyen 1960. (Van Roy was Peeters’s clinical biologist; Oeyen, his assistant.) Requests for offprints came flooding in from all over the world, especially after the introduction of Anovlar, over 50,000 of them.

Peeters closely followed the development of various hormones and their uses in the nineteen-fifties. He was aware of the work of Pincus and of the serious side-effects of Pincus’s Enovid, which was first introduced as a remedy against menstrual disorders in 1957. He knew that Schering AG had developed a number of hormones, and when Jean Frenay, a representative of Schering, told him the firm had combined two of them, norethisterone acetate and ethinylestradiol into an experimental preparation called SH-513 (containing 2 mg of the former and 0.01 mg of the latter) he asked for enough SH-513 to test it on a number of his patients. Peeters, wrote Frenay to Schering, “principally thinks of ovulation inhibition for contraceptive purposes.” Thus the idea of developing SH-513 into a contraceptive pill stemmed from Peeters, not from Schering. In fact, initially Schering’s principal gynecologist wanted Peeters to test SH-513 as a treatment for dysmenorrhea. But eventually Peeters got formal permission from Schering to test SH-513 for the purpose of contraception.

He was appointed head of the Maria Gabriël Maternity and of the gynecology department of Turnhout’s municipal Saint-Elisabeth hospital in 1951. Under his direction, that department became one of the best in the country. He acquired the most modern technology available, did innovative research, encouraged young and promising doctors that he hired to do likewise, and introduced new techniques like echography. In 1952 Leuven University appointed him as one of its supervisors of trainee doctors. This appointment was withdrawn in 1963, for reasons that remain unclear.

In 1948, upon the death of Jozef Simons, Nand Peeters succeeded him as chairman of the Turnhout branch of the Davidsfonds, a function which he retained until 1965.

Nand Peeters was a son of Désiré Peeters, a surgeon who founded his own clinic in Mechelen. After attending the local Saint Rumbold’s high school, he studied at the Catholic University of Leuven, intending to become a gynecologist. But he finished his training in a maternity ward in Bruges. In 1945 he married Paula Langbeen, with whom he had six children, and who was his book-keeper all his life—Peeters detested all administrative work. In 1946 he settled as an ob-gyn in Turnhout. At the time Turnhout had none, even though it was (and is) the largest town in the northern part of the Campine, with a population then of about 32,000. Perinatal infant mortality in Turnhout was between 10 and 12% before his arrival; in his first year in Turnhout he managed to bring it down to two cases in some 500 deliveries.

Whilst studying and for some time after his study, he was also a prominent leader in a catholic youth movement, the “Katholieke Studenten Actie” (KSA). His was a serious and time-consuming commitment: he wrote a brochure (Peeters 1944) for them, and in the days before his marriage, he could not be reached for a while, because he was inspecting KSA summer camps (together with Pieter De Somer, another KSA-leader who was to become a noted medical researcher).

Ferdinand “Nand” Peeters (Mechelen, October 13, 1918 – Turnhout, December 27, 1998) was a Belgian obstetrician and gynecologist, whose research led directly to the development of Anovlar, the first combined oral contraceptive pill introduced outside the United States, in 1961, the first whose side-effects were acceptable, and the first that was used world-wide (Albach 1997:939). It remained in production, in its original formula, from its introduction until 1986 — although, beginning in 1964, Schering AG (the company that produced it) also marketed variants with lower doses of hormones, some of which continued to be named Anovlar. Nand Peeters’s research also contributed substantially to the treatment of Rh-disease.