SEX & SEXUALITY, 1640-1940
Literary, Medical and Sociological Perspectives

Part 1: Sources from the Bodleian Library, Oxford and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London

"A well chosen and wide-ranging collection that will make major texts more widely available for the first time, Sex & Sexuality will help to restore the subject to its rightful place in research and teaching."
Professor Roy Porter
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine

This series sets out to provide the raw material for the dialogue already started by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall in The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950.
As their subtitle implies, a body of information and advice on sexuality was constructed from the seventeenth century onwards in the form of self-help manuals; moral tracts; medical dissertations; treatises of the specialist sexologists; works of literature; and texts on sexual habits, reproduction, masturbation, prostitution, and sexual pathologies.

These discourses of sexuality are now made available, enabling an exploration of the sexual mores, practices and beliefs of earlier ages. Through these texts we can understand how perceptions of the body have changed over time, and how attitudes towards sex have influenced broader gender issues.

Part 1 focuses on 17th, 18th and 19th century texts which are not likely to be available in most libraries. There is no overlap with our Women Advising Women, Women and Victorian Values or Masculinity series. 61 texts have been chosen from the resources of the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

In many cases, the border line between teaching and titillating is finely delineated. A text that crosses this frontier is the pseudo-Aristotelian Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which was intended as a sexual primer for married people. So popular was this anonymous work, that it went into 200 editions from its first appearance in 1684. Undaunted by wrong or misleading information, Aristotle’s Masterpiece persisted in being a compendium of medical misinformation and a sexological anachronism. Such advice included one ill-advised method of avoiding pregnancy by having sex as often as possible except on the dangerous days. An example of this skewed logic is the observation that whores do not often conceive. The "reason" is that grass is unlikely to grow on a path that is well trodden. Two editions are presented here.

Other important early texts included in Part 1 are Ferrand’s Erotomania, or a Treatise discoursing the Essence, Causes ... and Cure of Love, or Erotique Melancholy (1640); John Marten’s Gonosologium Novum: Or, a New System of all the Secret Infirmities and Diseases, Natural, Accidental, and Venereal in Men and Women ... with a further warning against Quacks (1709); Nicolas de Venette’s The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d (1712); and Daniel Defoe’s Conjugal Lewdness (1727), a long treatise on love, sex and marriage - the central themes of Moll Flanders, Colonel Jacque and Roxana.

Fears that the relationship between reproduction and sexual behaviour was being distorted were central to the anxieties that fuelled the campaign against masturbation. This was compounded by the fact that the history of anti-masturbation tracts has been riddled with misinformation. Onania or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (1710) believed by Peter Wagner to have been written by Balthazar Beckers (or Bekkers) makes a misguided connection between masturbation and venereal disease. Even the title is ill-informed since the Biblical Onan is concerned with coitus interruptus and not masturbation. Of all the afflictions said to be caused by masturbation, the most drastic must be the claim made in a supplement to Onania that "self-pollution" can cause even nuns to change sex. Both the original work and the supplement are included here, as well as a rejoinder by Philo-Castiatis entitled Onania Examined (1724).

Dr Tissot also draws attention to the dire consequences of masturbation for both sexes in his A New Guide to Health and Long Life, or Advice to families: being a treatise upon the disorders produced by the dangerous effects of secret and excessive venery among youths of both sexes (1808). J D T de Bienville signals masturbation as a prelude to nymphomania and hysteria and recommends as a deterrent such drastic measures as blood-letting, purging and in extreme cases, a strait-jacket.
Bienville’s dissertation on Nymphomania (1775) which he diagnoses as Furor Uterinus or mania of the womb, along with works like Rowley’s Practical Treatise on …the Breasts (1772), contribute towards the process of carving up the female body into eroticised and fetishised components, which led to the medicalisation of female sexuality during the 19th century.

A figure of erotic fantasy, who later became Lady Hamilton, the paramour of Lord Nelson, was the scantily clad eponymous personification of Dr James Graham’s Guardian goddess of health (1782). Described by Roy Porter as a "Vaudeville medical messiah" and "exhibitionist impresario, dramatising himself as a magus, a Prospero" and "Promethean enlightened despot of the body natural", Graham was most notorious for his Temple of Love, or of Health and Hymen. Its conjugal altar was a celestial bed through which were passed electrical currents in order to give couples "superior ecstasy" and to increase fertility for those when "powerfully agitated in the delights of love". All of this was for a nightly fee of £50. Five of Graham’s tracts are reproduced here including Il Convito Amoroso (1782), which contains a description of the "celebrated celestial bed".

Other guides to the erotic sciences included in Part 1 are Meibomius’s A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1718), which draws on the belief that "there are Persons who are stimulated to Venery by Strokes of Rods, and worked up into a Flame of Lust by Blows, and that the Part, which distinguishes us to be Men, should be raised by the Charm of invigorating Lashes." Edmund Curll, who was the translator, added a Treatise of Hermaphrodites to an English translation in 1718, for which he was prosecuted. He defended himself against accusations of obscenity by insisting "the fault is not in the Subject Matter, but the Inclination of the Reader, that makes these Pieces offensive".

Attempts to demystify sex and to provide help with problems related to it are found in medical texts such as: Douglas’ The Nature and Causes of Impotence in men, Barrenness in women, Explained (1758); Solomon’s Guide to Health (1800); Acton’s A complete practical treatise on venereal diseases (1841) and The Functions and disorders of the reproductive organs (1857); La’mert’s Self Preservation (1852); Allbutt’s The Wife’s Handbook (1886); and Robert Bell’s Women in Health and Sickness (1889) and Sterility (1896).

Contrasting moral and sociological perspectives on sex, love, marriage and relationships can be seen in works including: Moral and Instructive Tales for the Improvement of Young Ladies (1790); Beddoes’ Hygeia (1802); Madame Gamand’s The Phalantery (1841); Dinah Mulock’s A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (1858); Lovett’s Chartist Social and Political Morality (1853); Drysdal’s Elements of Social Science or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion (1861); Ritchie’s The Night Side of London (1870); Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871); Beale’s Our Morality and the Moral Question (1887); Lyttelton’s The Causes and Prevention of Immorality in Schools (1887); Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy: An Essay on the Population Question (1888); Geddes & Thomson’s The Evolution of Sex (1889); Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis ... A Medico-Forensic Study (1892); and Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age (1896) and The Intermediate Sex (1908). All are featured in this first part.

For the Victorians a principal concern was the social and moral consequences of prostitution and disease. William Acton’s classic Prostitution considered in its moral, social and sanitary aspects in London and in other large cities (1857) is included, as well as: Ryan’s Prostitution in London, with a comparative view of that of Paris and New York (1839); Miller’s Prostitution considered in relation to its cause and cure (1859); Chapman’s Prostitution, governmental experiments in controlling it (1870); Lowndes’ Prostitution and venereal diseases in Liverpool (1886); and Prostitution in Europe (1914). There are also a number of pamphlets published by the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children.

As the developments described above reveal, the collections of writings included here are not just a potpourri of sex and sexuality. They are an index to what Michel Foucault terms "sexualities".

By opening up a subject that has remained largely inaccessible, this series makes available many writings that have been restricted to specialist libraries and obscure archives. Many of these texts have been subject to taboo, censorship, prejudice and condemnation and have been relegated to the periphery.

This series will enhance our understanding of the sexual enlightenment and its aftermath and the way in which individuals have negotiated their sexual practices and beliefs throughout the course of history.