Charles Knowlton - Later Life

Later Life

Knowlton became the leading country doctor in western Massachusetts, with a “ride” that covered thirty towns. He contributed several articles to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, as well as Kneeland’s freethought paper, the Boston Investigator. Knowlton was an officer of several freethinking societies in New England and New York, and founded “The Friends of Mental Liberty” in Greenfield in 1845. In addition to affirming its members' right of “freely enquiring into the truth of all religions which claim to be a Revelation from some intelligent being superior to man,” the group’s Constitution declared that “Female members of this Society shall enjoy the same rights and privileges as male members.”

Knowlton died February 20, 1850. Twenty-seven years later, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were tried in London for publishing Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy there. The book had been selling in moderate numbers in the interim; the publicity of the Bradlaugh-Besant trial made it an overnight bestseller. Its circulation increased from an average of 700 per year to 125,000 in just one year; Besant subsequently published her own birth control manual. The trial, and Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy are credited with reversing British population growth and popularizing contraception in Great Britain and America.