Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed
Lydia Syson / Biography / Cultural History / History / Non-Fiction
UK Publisher
All book publishing rights now available, having reverted to the author. (Previous publishers: Alma Books)
Date Published
September 8th, 2008
Dr Graham set out to bring the sublime into the sex life of every married couple. Widely considered the world’s first sex therapist, he guaranteed both ecstasy and fertility to the users of his infamous Celestial Bed, a contraption which harnessed all the most exciting developments of the Enlightenment. Electricity, magnetism, mind-altering gases and music all played a part in this astonishing invention, luxuriously designed to produce pleasure and perfect babies.
Graham’s medical career took him from his native Edinburgh to America and back again, and he crossed paths with many of the most famous individuals of his day. The doctor’s well-publicised efforts to overturn medical orthodoxy provoked both admiration and ridicule. He was crowned “the King of Quacks”.
The first and only comprehensive biography of James Graham, Doctor of Love is a portrait of a remarkable eighteenth-century celebrity, revealing a character of great complexity: startlingly progressive, extraordinarily arrogant and touchingly humane. He was the epitome of his era, yet utterly one of a kind
Reviews
Syson’s enthralling book offers a new portrait of Graham as an authentic innovator… admirable and engaging.
Syson pins the iconoclastic Graham like a butterfly on the wider canvas of a lively social history.
- The Times
I was entranced by Lydia Syson's superb volume...
- Scotland on Sunday
Lydia Syson enterprisingly and entertainingly explores the fringes of eighteenth-century science…to give us a brilliant biography of the Scottish apothecary-physician-sexologist-nutritionist-showman Dr James Graham (1745-94).
In her canny and erudite new book, Lydia Syson presents Graham as the first sex therapist, showman and entrepreneur. She navigates a tightrope between Graham as huckster and Graham as physician, and in the process raises important questions for the history of medicine.
Syson’s delightful book will engross readers with its marvellous racy material, delivered with the perfect mixture of contextual understanding and fluid, sprightly wit.
Wordsworth gave us the egotistic sublime, and Graham the sexual sublime; Lydia Syson has given us a highly enjoyable peep from behind the partition at one of the eighteenth century’s weirdest and most wonderful figures.
Superlatives soar off the page in this enjoyable account of Dr. James Graham’s professional life over the course of his career spanning the 1760s to ’90s. Graham was the purveyor of “cutting-edge” medical treatments, most notably electrical therapy, supplemented by magnetism, ether and nitrous oxide, music, and scent. Lydia Syson tackles his relatively short, frequently itinerant, life with wit and intelligence.
fascinating account of the scientific maverick…Syson convincingly assesses the doctor as a perfect example of those Enlightenment figures who challenged religious and social orthodoxies.
Eye-opening.
- TIme Out
Syson pins the iconoclastic Graham like a butterfly on the wider canvas of a lively social history.
- Times Literary Supplement
A valuable contribution to the study of sexuality, medicine, and eccentricity in the late eighteenth century. Doctor of Love is, after all, the only book-length biography of Graham; it is, moreover, a very entertaining account of a fascinating eccentric.