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  • Publisher:
    Cambridge University Press
    Publication date:
    24 June 2025
    10 July 2025
    ISBN:
    9781009578103
    9781009578073
    9781009578080
    Creative Commons:
    Creative Common License - CC Creative Common License - BY Creative Common License - NC Creative Common License - ND
    This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.
    https://creativecommons.org/creativelicenses
    Dimensions:
    (229 x 152 mm)
    Weight & Pages:
    0.58kg, 306 Pages
    Dimensions:
    (229 x 152 mm)
    Weight & Pages:
    0.445kg, 306 Pages
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Book description

Bringing together perspectives from the histories of medicine, sexuality, and the book, Sarah Bull presents the first study of how medical publications on sexual matters were made, promoted, and sold in Victorian Britain. Drawing on pamphlets, manuals, textbooks, periodicals, and more, this innovative book illustrates the free and unruly circulation of sexual information through a rapidly expanding publishing industry. Bull demonstrates how the ease with which print could be copied and claimed, recast and repurposed, presented persistent challenges to those seeking to position themselves as authorities over sexual knowledge at this pivotal moment. Medical publishers, practitioners, and activists embraced allegations of obscenity and censorship to promote ideas, contest authority, and consolidate emergent collective identities. Layer by layer, their actions helped create and sustain one of the most potent myths ever made about the Victorians: their sexual ignorance.This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Reviews

‘This is revisionist history in the finest sense of the term. With far more depth than any previous study, it analyzes the business of publishing sexual literature in the nineteenth century. It challenges the myth of Victorian sexual ignorance, showing that erotic literature was far more available than we imagined. And it convincingly argues that Victorian censorship of sex was far from airtight.'

Jonathan Rose - Drew University

‘Bull skilfully connects Holywell Street pornographers, medical writers, and sex radicals in unexpected and wholly satisfying ways. She shows that Victorian medicine, sex, and obscenity were (dare I say it) often bedfellows.'

Mary E. Fissell - Johns Hopkins University

‘From the shady publishers of Holywell Street in the 1830s to the purveyors of ‘semi-scientific' pornography in the 1890s, we are taken on a journey through the world of sexual and medical publishing, with surprising findings which radically recast our understandings of the obscenity debates in the nineteenth century.'

Sally Shuttleworth - University of Oxford

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Contents

Full book PDF
  • Selling Sexual Knowledge
    pp i-ii
  • Selling Sexual Knowledge - Title page
    pp iii-iii
  • Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain
  • Copyright page
    pp iv-iv
  • Dedication
    pp v-vi
  • Contents
    pp vii-viii
  • Figures
    pp ix-x
  • Acknowledgements
    pp xi-xiii
  • Abbreviations
    pp xiv-xiv
  • Introduction
    pp 1-21
  • 1 - Holywell Street Medicine
    pp 22-56
  • 2 - Stereotyped Knowledge
    pp 57-89
  • 3 - Publishing for Professional Advantage
    pp 90-120
  • 4 - Obscene … in a Certain Sense
    pp 121-151
  • 5 - Dull Instead of Light
    pp 152-180
  • 6 - Branding Birth Control
    pp 181-212
  • 7 - Be Careful about the Publisher
    pp 213-243
  • Conclusion
    pp 244-249
  • Victorian Ignorance
  • Appendices
    pp 250-254
  • Appendix A: - Holywell Street Publishers’ Catalogues
    pp 250-251
  • Appendix B: - Translations of Consulting Surgeons’ Manuals
    pp 252-254
  • Bibliography
    pp 255-283
  • Index
    pp 284-290

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