(Excerpt from The Hygiene of Childbearing Reason of Dang...)
Excerpt from The Hygiene of Childbearing Reason of Danger. - The reason for this is not hard to understand. The two chief dangers in abortion are blood-poisoning and hemorrhage. Very few die from hemorrhage; most of the deaths are due to blood-poison ing; and in early abortion the danger of blood-poisoning is greatly increased by the difficulty of emptying the uterus, and the frequency with which it is wounded. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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William Rittenhouse was born in Mülheim-am-Ruhr, in Rhenish Prussia, opposite the town of Broich. His name is variously spelled Rittenhausen, Rüddinghuysen, and, by William Penn, Rittinghausen. He was the son of George Rittenhausen and Maria (Hagerhoffs), and some genealogists have claimed that he was descended from a kinsman of the Hapsburg emperors.
Authentic but less ambitious records show that William Rittenhouse himself was a Mennonite minister of Broich in the Rhineland. Sometime in the latter part of the seventeenth century, he removed with his family to Arnhem, in the Netherlands, where with a brother he carried on a papermaking business. From Arnhem Rittenhouse and his children moved to Amsterdam.
On June 23, 1678, he became a Dutch citizen, and the document recording his naturalization refers to him as a paper maker. From Amsterdam the family emigrated to America in 1688.
They settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, which had been founded five years before by thirteen families, who were mostly weavers by trade and Mennonite in religion. William Rittenhouse was chosen to be their first minister, and in 1703, he was elected bishop of the first Mennonite church in America by the authority of four ministers of the Hamburg congregation in Germany.
Since none of the ministers who had elected him was able to come to America to install him as bishop, he refused to exercise the functions of that office, but he continued as minister and gave the land on which the first Mennonite church was built. Shortly after settling in Germantown, Rittenhouse formed a company for the purpose of building a paper mill. The partners included Robert Turner, Thomas Tresse, and William Bradford, one of the first printers in the colonies.
The company leased twenty acres of land in Roxborough Township from Samuel Carpenter for 999 years. Here on Paper Mill Run, near the Wissahickon Creek, the first paper mill to be erected in the colonies was built in 1690.
When Bradford moved to New York in 1693, he leased his one-quarter share in the mill to William Rittenhouse and his son Klaas for ten years, and sold it to them outright in 1704. By purchasing the holdings of the other partners, Rittenhouse and his son became sole proprietors by 1705/06.
The water-mark of the Rittenhouse paper was a clover leaf, with the letters "WR" and the word "Pensilvania. " In the early years of the mill almost the whole output was taken by Bradford.
The original mill was destroyed by flood either in 1700 or in 1701, during William Penn's second visit to America, and Penn recommended that "such persons as should be disposed to lend them aid give the sufferers relief and encouragement in their needful and commendable employment".
The mill was rebuilt a little farther down the stream in 1702, and after the death of the elder Rittenhouse at Germantown, in 1708, the business was carried on by his son Klaas, who also became a minister.
(Excerpt from The Hygiene of Childbearing Reason of Dang...)
His family consisted of two sons - Klaas, later called Nicholas or Claus, and Gerhard, later called Garret - and a daughter, Elizabeth. There are no records of his wife.
