"Alan F. Guttmacher, chief of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and a member of the medical advisory committee of the council, had warned against intrauterine devices in his popular marriage manual, but when a member of his department at Mount Sinai approached him in 1958 with an idea for a new kind of IUD, Guttmacher listened. Dr.Lazar Margulies, who was Berlin trained and who had used an intrauterine device in the late twenties in Berlin came to me with the idea that an intrauterine device could be made of molded plastic and the advantage was that you could stretch it to a linear form. . . and it would resume its original shape. Marguies has been inspired to give the old method a second look when he heard John Rock, the Harvard gynecologist who had served on the AMA committee on contraception in the 1930s and who has the object of an intense lobbying effort by Robert Dickinson, lecture on the dangers of overpopulation. The substitution of plastic for wire meant that the device could be inserted without dilating the cervix (stretching the mouth of the womb), a painful procedure that required local anesthesia. The molded plastic coil was unwound into a thin rod, the rod slipped into the uterus, and the coil pushed out of the rod into the uterus, where it regained its original shape. Guttmacher allowed Margulies to try out the device “with some fear and hesitation because I was taught in medical school how dangerous the intrauterine device was.” They worked. Patients did not die of pelvic inflammatory disease or develop galloping cancer."