The Facts of Life

by Hall, Lesley A.

• ISBN13: 9780300062212
• ISBN10: 0300062214
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-01-01
• Publisher: Yale Univ Pr

Summary

This remarkable study presents the first detailed and scholarly analysis of the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain. Surveying the period between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, it examines the major texts which established and authorised sexual knowledge and sexual practices. Porter and Hall then explore the various kinds of backgroundssexual, moral, religious, scientific, medical, domestic, social and cultural - without which these texts are unintelligible. And they examine their authors (some famous, some obscure, some anonymous), their careers, and the motives for involvement in medico-moral campaigns that were often thought unsavoury and commonly led to criticism and censure.
The Facts of Life also assesses the wider impact of the publication of sexual knowledge and especially of sex advice literature, and explores the interplay between expertise, therapy, social mores and behaviour. Chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries discuss prostitution, contagious diseases and gender relations, and consider debates on sexual issues and associated revelations of personal experience.

Author Biography

Roy Porter is Professor in the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
From the Restoration to Victoria	p. 1
Introduction: Histories of Sex	p. 3
Contexts: from the Restoration to the Accession of Queen Victoria	p. 14
Medical Folklore in High and Low Culture: Aristotle's Master-Piece	p. 33
Appendices to Chapter Two	p. 54
Doctors and the Medicalization of Sex in the Enlightenment	p. 65
Masturbation in the Enlightenment: Knowledge and Anxiety	p. 91
Quackery and Erotica	p. 106
The Victorians and Beyond	p. 123
Introduction: Towards Victoria	p. 125
The Victorian Polyphony, 1850-85	p. 132
From the Primeval Protozoa to the Laboratory: the Evolution of Sexual Science from 1889 to the 1930s	p. 155
The Authority of Individual Experience and the Opinions of Experts: Sex as a Social Science	p. 178
'Good Sex': the New Rhetoric of Conjugal Relations	p. 202
Public Faces in Private Places: Sex, Law, Politics and Pressure Groups	p. 224
Silent Stares, Smut, Censorship and Surgical Stores: the Makings of Popular Sexual Knowledges	p. 247
Conclusion	p. 271
Notes	p. 285
Bibliography	p. 354
Index	p. 398
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