Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed by Lydia Syson

Widely accepted as the world s first sex therapist, Dr Graham set out to bring the sublime into the sex life of every married couple. 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 impart exquisite pleasure and produce 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-publicized efforts to overturn medical orthodoxy provoked both admiration and ridicule. He was crowned the King of Quacks . Doctor of Love the first comprehensive biography of James Graham is a fully rounded portrait of a remarkable eighteenth-century celebrity, revealing a complex character, at once startlingly progressive, extraordinarily arrogant and touchingly humane. He was the epitome of his era, yet utterly one of a kind.