Clarence Gamble - Global Contacts, Global Contexts

Global Contacts, Global Contexts

In 1949, Clarence was talking with Frank W. Notestein, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton and future president of the Population Council. Notestein mentioned that Japan was “ripe for birth control.” Gamble, in his typical fashion, offered to put up a small sum to translate birth control pamphlets into Japanese. This eventually led to correspondence with Dr. Yoshio Koya, director of Japan’s National Institute of Public Health.

At that time, much to the distress of their government, Japanese women were terminating half of their pregnancies by abortion. Koya needed support for a field study to determine whether the Japanese would use contraception, were it available. Somewhat tentatively, Clarence, who knew Koya only through correspondence, advanced $700. It was a small investment, which in the Gamble way was to yield big results in a very short time.

Koya’s Three Village study began fieldwork in November 1950. By May 1951, the study showed that 92 percent of the Japanese population wanted contraception. Koya took this “rather amazing data” to the minister of welfare, and in 1952, the Japanese government allotted funds to put free birth control clinics into all Japanese health centers.

Thus began a long-term professional relationship between Clarence and Dr. Koya. For the next 15 years, Gamble supported Koya generously and came to regard him as the one who did more for Japan’s birth control program than any other single individual. This Japan venture also marked the entry of Clarence into widespread international activity and the buildup of the Pathfinder team of dedicated colleagues and fieldworkers.

Among the dedicated was John E. Gordon, a retiring professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s School of Public Health. In 1949, Gordon had turned his academic inquiries to population growth and was convinced that the same methodology applied to epidemiology studies could be used to examine population problems. In 1951, Clarence funded an exploratory visit by Gordon to the Punjab state of India. The resulting India-Harvard-Ludhiana or Khanna study examined the use of contraceptives by Indians in that region and continued for 17 years, generating some three dozen articles, a book, and a monograph.

In October 1952, Clarence and Sarah left Massachusetts to meet Dr. Koya in person and attend the November conference in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), India, of the newly organized International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Clarence would be gone for five months, until March 1953. This was the first of his many long trips during the 1950s, in which he did his own fieldwork, going from city to town to village to city, introducing himself and the “Great Cause.”

At the IPPF Bombay conference, Clarence was busily finding foreign doctors interested in testing and collecting data on the effectiveness of simple methods of contraception. In the 1930s he had attempted to do this, working with a list of missionary doctors supplied by his brother Sidney, who was a member of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. Little had come of that attempt: foreign customs levied large duties, the climate quickly reduced powder and sponge to paste and gum, and overworked missionary physicians had no time to keep the careful records Clarence needed for substantive clinical studies. The Bombay conference offered new contacts and new opportunities.