Calypso à la pharmacie

Summary: How (with what herbs, in particular), but also why does the Greek peasant woman of Antiquity try to avoid pregnancy? What can the ethnologist or the historian of ideas say about this? What does the pharmacologist, who has been taught in the hard sciences, say, and why (how) do they both find it impossible to talk with each other? What would the peasant woman think about it, if she were to arrive at her healer's place early morning to try one of those remedies, one of those little known herbs? Why little known?