Perfecting the world: the life and times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin 1798–1866

eighteenth-century sexuality is beginning to emerge which takes us beyond the memoirs of Boswell. Historians of eighteenth-century medicine will find the volume especially interesting. Virtually every essay has some bearing on the history of medicine, for medical men occupied a vital position in the sexual marketplace. It was medical men who produced the serious and not-so-serious sexual literature of the age; the clergy, it seems, pretended that sex did not exist. It was medical men, again, who administered to the sexually incompetent and the sexually wounded through their pills and potions: they laid down the parameters of the sexually natural and claimed to be able to keep the sexually active whole. Indeed, according to Roy Porter, medical men were not just the orchestrators of the sexual dance, but keen participants. That eighteenth-century creation the man-midwife was a sexual predator. Like the dancing-master and the eunuch, he was often a liberating force in the aristocratic household, offering his prestigious clients a sexual as well as a medical service. There can be no doubt, then, that Sexual underworlds of the Enlightenment is an informative and thought-provoking publication. Once introduced to this rich dish of sexual delicacies, the reader can only wish he could stay longer at the table. Even now there still seem so many aspects of eighteenth-century erotica unexplored. When, for instance, will someone write on that ultimate eighteenth-century experience in sexual titillation: the stuffed mermaid? This reviewer awaits with eagerness the third volume of the trilogy.