Sarah Bull, "Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
45:32 Share

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Sarah Ball about selling sexual knowledge, medical publishing, and obscenity in Victorian Britain. So welcome to the podcast. Oh, thanks so much for having me. This is a great book. It's so, so interesting, both in terms of

the subject, but also I think in terms of getting us to sort of rethink what we think about the period and the subject. And you come to obscenity, I guess the kind of role of sex in Victorian society through what could be quite a kind of dry or boring world of medical publishing. And I'm sort of fascinated by, I guess, how

how you came to want to write about medical publishing because in some ways it, yeah, like,

the distance between the subject of the medical publishing and then, you know, if someone said, I'm going to write about the medical book industry, those two things seem to be quite kind of different. So, yeah, what got you kind of interested and inspired to write about it? Oh, I completely fell into it. This was not the original plan. I was at the early stages of a very different project and I think maybe a more conventional project about Victorian sexuality.

And I thought at the time that knowing how someone might learn about sex through reading what they might read and where would they buy it would be helpful for that project. And I figured that this would take like a few weeks. I would read some secondary literature. And at the

At the same time, I was working as a research assistant for somebody who was studying the late 19th century pornographic book trade. And I stumbled on an ad for a sexological study in the back of one of the books that I was taking notes on for this person.

And this really piqued my curiosity. What did it mean that a pornographer was selling this book? Did sexologists know that they were? And if so, how did they feel about it?

Who else was selling that book at the time? So selling sexual knowledge really grew out of those kinds of questions. Questions about publishing and bookselling practices, about the politics of publishing and bookselling, and about how they relate to each other.

I mean, that, I guess, kind of moment of inspiration really does capture so many of the big sort of questions in the book. And it's kind of fascinating, I guess, that intersection of pornography, medicine, but also commerce as well. And the tensions, I think, between the three of them and how they kind of

struggle really kind of animates the story that the book is trying to say really and maybe we'll take the three of them sort of in turn first off what are we actually talking about when we're talking about these kind of medical books what is it about them that means that you know on the one hand

They could cross over into pornography, but at the same time, you know, they are part of, I guess, the kind of formal development of, as you say, sexology.

Yeah, so medical was like a pretty capacious category in the 19th century. And selling sexual knowledge really reflects that. So it focuses on books that were or were believed to be nonfiction works focused on the body and how it functions on health and disease.

or that try and explain how certain sexual practices and desires develop. So it looks at books on anatomy, on midwifery, on fertility, on contraception, on venereal disease and supposedly foreign sexual practices and deviant acts and reference books that extracted or boiled down that kind of information for more specialized books. And

Before the 19th century, for a long time, really since the early modern period and since kind of the rise of print, people had often worried and scholars of the early modern period have done great work on this. People had often there became kind of this increasing concern that.

um that reading about sex even in a medical context uh could be arousing but people could misuse medical books um people um could use them for the wrong reasons um and uh and we see doctors becoming increasingly concerned um prior to the 19th century about um

their motivations for publishing on sexual issues, publishing about, say, female reproductive anatomy could be misinterpreted.

So in the 19th century, really, you have all this media change and you also have new laws against the display and distribution of, quote unquote, obscene material come into play.

So, and we can talk about what that means in a minute if you like, but essentially there's this idea that medical books kind of fall into this category where there's still this long history of concern that people can misuse them, that they can even harm people.

that's coming to bear on the situation. But at the same time, they're also seen as necessary books, learned books. You need books that will explain to people, ordinary readers and also kind of doctors and scientists themselves, how the body works, why we desire what we desire,

you know, how to preserve your reproductive kind of functions, like fertility, that kind of thing. So medical books are both useful, but there's also long been this kind of question about how they can be used for reasons that aren't sanctioned. And this...

unsightly use that's a wonderful uh term isn't it i i guess is the story that the book tells and i mentioned that kind of struggle over you know what is allowed what isn't how boundaries are drawn about you know why is a medical book why is pornography what is an acceptable use what what isn't um

But the other thing I should have mentioned is that there's kind of a sort of cast of characters, kind of four groups that the book talks about. And I think to understand the book, it'd be good to understand a bit about those. We've got, I guess, social reformers, people who I suppose we call pornographers selling obscene material. And then two kinds of medics, what, if I understood correctly, were kind of like

proper doctors and then a variety of kind of what you call irregular practitioners. What the doctors are really keen to say are not doctors, but also, I don't know, you know,

listeners might think of a variety of kind of, you know, wellness practitioners that we have today and the struggles over, you know, sort of medicine and not medicine in our kind of contemporary time. So yeah, who are our sort of foreplayers?

Yeah, yeah. So the book, I guess, like, like, the approach I took was to really look at how people, I was interested in how people dealt with this kind of medical books or books that are considered medical kind of falling into this sort of uncertain category where they're clearly useful, but they could be misused. You know, what did that actually mean? At the time? How did people negotiate that?

at this moment when there are a huge number of books being published compared to earlier periods. So I looked at four, as you say, I looked at four different kinds of players who produced medical books and how they interacted with each other. One, as you say, were what's called in the book regular medical practitioners. So

and the specialist medical publishers who they worked for with. These were practitioners, as you say, who considered themselves certainly proper doctors. They're accepted by major medical institutions like the royal colleges,

Medicine wasn't a legally regulated profession until 1858, but institutions attempted to regulate it in other ways and medical practitioners attempted to regulate themselves in other ways. And this is a group that sees themselves as legit doctors.

The second group, as you pointed out, were irregular practitioners. I called them in the book. And basically, yeah, they encompass practitioners who weren't accepted by or expelled from institutions like the Royal Colleges, but still practiced medicine. So some of the irregulars that I look in the book were formally trained. They had formal training and even for a while belonged there.

to kind of elite medical societies. But they behaved very differently than regular practitioners were supposed to do. And I think that analogy with kind of wellness influencers is really apt. They self-published books.

books on different medical kind of concerns. And they have made a very commercial style of medical practice. They really use books as a vehicle to sell themselves as experts in particular issues that people are concerned about, like venereal disease, what we now call STIs.

The third group that the book looks at are radicals. This encompasses a diverse kind of group of people who are politically active and supported a diverse array of sexual reform movements that got them invested in disseminating medical work on sex and reproduction. Some of them advocated for the widespread adoption of contraception, especially as a way to fight poverty.

Others advocated abolishing marriage in favor of free love. Others were interested in more acceptance for same-sex relationships, and especially in the late 19th century, abolishing the 1886 Criminal Law Amendment Act.

which had essentially made consenting sex between men illegal. So they're also very interested in medical arguments for changes to social structure around sex and sexuality. And the final group I look at, and the group the first chapter really focuses on, especially in the last chapter,

are our pornographers, entrepreneurs who specialized in selling sexual material.

So they sold sexually explicit novels and images and often body periodicals and songbooks and other cheap reading material. But they also sold and published and sometimes created medical books. So in the early and mid-Victorian period, this includes books and pamphlets on midwifery and fertility and contraception and venereal disease. At the end of the 19th century, it includes sexological material about sexism.

the origins of sexual desire or sexual behaviors and imitations of those works. So I was really interested. I became really interested in these four groups in particular because I

A lot of their publications kind of crossed over. Either the irregulars often made their books by copying and pasting from books that regular practitioners made, as well as from each other. So they're selling a lot of the same information.

Similarly, a lot of people who considered themselves sort of radicals, especially who are interested in contraception,

are publishing the same books on contraception as pornographers at the time. So there's a sense in that these quite different groups with different identities are selling some of the same material. And one of the big arguments of the book is that debates about...

Whether a medical book is obscene and what counts as an obscene medical book partly stem from the fact that all these different groups are trying to define themselves and position themselves as experts in

And and to do that, they need to say that that other people are not legitimate experts or are somehow tainting this really important work. So the tensions, the debate about obscenity to a certain degree is really intensified by the fact that all of these groups are working at the same time and are kind of in tension with each other.

Yeah, I mean, one really brilliant illustration of that comes, I guess, kind of in the middle of the book where there are two chapters about...

these irregulars, these consulting surgeons, these quacks as the book, and I guess kind of our popular language now would maybe describe them. And then, you know, medical publishers who are extremely concerned both not to be associated with the irregulars and

and not to be kind of drawn in to the idea of, I guess, the kind of, you know, ungentlemanly world of just commerce, you know, because they are like scientists, medics doing publishing. And I wonder actually to kind of really illustrate the point you've just made, if you could say a bit about how those battles took place really between on the one hand, the kind of

the quacks and their materials, how-to manuals, but then the kind of medical profession with its much more, well, its story of much more kind of scientific publication. Yeah, so the first kind of a bit over half the book takes place kind of between the early, late 1830s and kind of early 1860s. And this is a huge transitional moment in a lot of ways.

In medicine, there's a lot of desire for reform at the time, especially in the early part of that period. A lot of regular medics are really dissatisfied with their status in society. Public trust in medicine is pretty shaky. They

They have to compete with each other for patients. A lot of medics are not really making a steady income. They feel that their kind of hierarchies of governance through various institutions are not working and that they're corrupt. And they really want to transform medicine into this field that is trusted and trustworthy. That's overtly scientific medicine.

and distanced and that something that the public can trust and that is worthy of trust. So there are a couple of things that I so this comes into play in this history because at the same time you have

doctors, while they feel this way, also really need to make a living and publishing comes to be acknowledged as a way that medics use to promote themselves as experts. So publishing becomes kind of controversial within the regular medical community. When

are you publishing for the public benefit and when are you publishing just to promote yourself? You know, can you promote yourself? So you have the rise of these publishers, these gentlemanly kind of specialist publishers of medical material at the time who are really seeking to

to serve these kinds of authors. But they have to deal with a situation where their authors are in a profession that's really virulently anti-advertising because there's this idea that advertising undercuts public trust in medical... in medical...

kind of expertise um that um advertising kind of uh reveals that the practitioner has a profit motive um in a situation where where books are are increasingly seen as potentially a kind of advertising um so so publishers are trying to kind of balance the fact that like they

they need to promote their books and authors want to promote them, but they need to make it seem not commercial. And authors are trying to deal with this too. At the same time, this is intensified by the fact that the irregulars, the kind of quacks, as we would call them, are really, their publishing is absolutely exploding in this period. So there's a group of irregulars, writers,

that really focus on publishing work on venereal disease, sexual dysfunction, impotence, the dangers of masturbation. And they're self-publishing these works on these topics and they're selling them on kind of a global scale. Some books were translated into six or seven languages and distributed all over the world.

They're advertising them every day in dozens or hundreds of newspapers at home and abroad. And they're using these books as essentially kind of advertorials for their services. So this concern about publishing as a form of advertising is really intensified by what these irregulars are doing at the time.

And doctors' previous kind of concerns about things like that they would be misunderstood for publishing on sexual matters kind of gets displaced in a way by concern that they will be mistaken for quacks, that they'll be mistaken for these medical publishers.

Sorry, mistaken for these irregulars. And at the same time, they really want to get rid of these irregulars. They think they're dragging medicine down reputationally. And they're also making a ton of money. These irregulars are also making a lot of money. They treat medicine like a business. And doctors really want to take them out.

So there's this kind of like there's this at once this very uncertain relationship with publishing and medicine and this very hostile relationship towards irregulars that kind of culminates in.

the 1850s, when they start arguing that medical works published by irregulars are obscene and that irregulars should be prosecuted under obscenity laws and their books should be destroyed because they're harming people. And this follows...

a period of, kind of a period where at the same time, private anti-vice societies, and one in particular, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, had been trying to crack down on the pornography trade

And in the 1850s, this often involved kind of lobbying the government for better laws that would make this easier.

And especially involved seizing a lot of pornographers' stock and then arguing that it should be destroyed. And this becomes much easier with the passage of the 1857 Publication Act, the Obscene Publications Act.

And medical works, kind of like Aristotle's masterpiece, are often in the kind of huge sort of mounds of stock that are seized in these raids of pornographers' shops.

And one of the arguments they make is that this material is obscene as well. And partly it's because they really just want to destroy these publishers' businesses and get as much of their stock destroyed as possible.

um, they want to put them out of business. Um, so, so regular practitioners, especially who are interested in medical reform, um, kind of see this and say, Hey, maybe we can use obscenity laws, um, to go after irregular practitioners. Maybe we can argue that their books are obscene and get them destroyed too. And, you know, also, uh, um,

also make the public not like them because their books are very cheap and they're very popular. I mean, in some ways it sort of works and I think maybe towards the end of the conversation we'll have a chat about the historiography of the period and how the book kind of allows us to rethink some of that. But

We've heard about, I guess, the kind of

three quarters of the key players there um you know pornographers and stuff that the victorians would have seen is you know almost straightforwardly obscene but then this tension between um regular and irregular medicine what's going on with reformers because i was struck actually right towards the end of the book that um what seemed to be i guess kind of um

discussions within almost kind of medicine itself. You know, you flagged earlier in our chat, you know, kind of key reformers around access to contraceptive health are shifting into the realm of kind of, you know,

free speech, anti-obscenity, almost kind of like, yeah, publishing law rather than public health. And I guess the story of the kind of the reformers is one we haven't touched on. So what's going on there? What is their kind of role in the book? Yeah. So throughout the 19th century, kind of, there had certainly been people who were interested in politics

progressive or, or revolutionary social change, um, who are also interested in, in thinking about, um, sexual, um, uh, kind of sexual reform as part of that change. And we actually, um, some of those people, um, are, are kind of, kind of the root, become the roots of the pornography trade. Um, interestingly, um, a lot of radicals kind of in the 1810s and 20s who advocate, um, uh, different forms of social life, um,

Some of them kind of become the first sort of specialist dealers in sexual material, and they go in that direction. But they're also, throughout the 19th century and kind of increasingly in the late 19th century, there are groups who take another kind of approach where they're affiliated with kind of feminist or socialist groups.

or secularist groups who remain really interested in

certain kinds of reform to kind of marital arrangements or sexual or reproductive practices as part of as part of kind of larger political goals. So one of the one of the groups I look at is is quite well known kind of in the history of Islam.

19th century sexuality groups from the 1870s to the early 1900s who are very interested in advocating for contraception, that people and especially the poor should use contraception as a way to alleviate poverty and also to protect against maternal health.

For a long time, doctors and I think I think this is partly a strategy to just not have to engage with the issue for a long time. Medical practitioners argued that contraception was not a medical issue at all. You know, it just wasn't their thing. They're not associated with it. That's not a medical thing.

But in the late 19th century, in the 1870s, you've got this, you know, intensifying interest that had been around in these kind of reformist or radical circles, but it was really intensifying.

Some of these people are doctors who are kind of heterodox in their beliefs about contraception. Others are political activists and

One of the challenges around contraception is really that the pornography trade had adopted so much contraception literature in the 1830s and 1840s. So early pamphlets on contraception published by political kind of radicals like Richard Carlyle, the radical printer who wrote and published Every Woman's Book,

The American Charles Knowlton, who published Fruits of Philosophy. Those books were very heavily kind of promoted in the pornography trade, which also sold condoms. So contraception kind of by the 1870s is like quite tightly associated culturally with pornography.

with porn in a weird way, because not because people necessarily consider it pornographic, but because of the kinds of people who are selling it and alongside what, and it's kind of, there's a concern that it's associated with seediness.

And in the 1870s, there's a player who kind of has feet in both realms. He's associated with kind of the secularist movement, a movement for running society, free religion. But he also sells kind of sexual material, including both Knowlton's Roots of Philosophy and kind of sexual entertainment material.

he gets arrested and is on trial for selling fruits of philosophy because this is what the police can find.

And and this gives an opportunity where contraception advocates in radical circles start claim start to seize on this. And they really argue that the government is unfairly censoring material on contraception material on sexuality, right?

And that they wouldn't do this with more elite works. They're only doing this for works that could be useful to the poor. And so rather than being... So this argument is...

kind of functions as a way partly to move the debate about contraception away from things like, is it moral to use contraception and away from its association with the pornography trade and over to, hey, contraception in their telling is a free speech issue. We should be able to talk about contraception. Contraception is useful.

So, so there's, there's this kind of focus on on free speech that something around which like a lot more, a lot more people associated with kind of progressive and radical politics can get behind, they can get behind free speech where they might not necessarily be able to get behind contraception itself.

So we see this kind of increasing, and the last chapter, which focuses more on kind of sexologists and sort of free love advocates, free speech becomes increasingly associated with sexual material and the argument that I...

people are censoring speech around sex becomes a way for people associated with kind of progressive and radical interests in sex and sexuality to argue that they have the truth about sex that they can share with everybody and that people need to talk about these issues because they're being censored.

So it's a way to kind of be able to talk about this material without dealing with the fact that it's about issues that people actually might find controversial. And instead, it's about free speech, which even the British government thinks is important. That kind of point, yeah.

around the idea of, um, you know, Victorians like not talking, um, about sex and sexual matters, um, is something that I suspect is probably still with us in, in kind of popular, um,

perceptions of the period even though as you note in the book you know and people in the field know kind of historians and I guess kind of cultural theorists as well have basically pretty much kind of debunked and I'm interested to know what the book's study of you know that struggle over the territory of commerce medicine and pornography kind of tells us about that myth I guess kind of

why I suppose the kind of first historians of the Victorian period had kind of read the situation so wrong. Yeah, I think partly because, and this was really hammered home to me when I was working on this material, I think it actually made sense because when you read a lot of sources from the Victorian period, like scholars now know that people published a lot on sex and they discussed

sex endlessly. Michelle Foucault famously kind of made this argument. But when you read sources, especially from the late 19th and early 20th century, about sexuality, especially by people like sexologists and sex reformers, even people in the medical community, often they refer to the Victorian period as a period when people

sexual discussion was censored or that it was silenced or that people were ignorant of sex. So I think this kind of makes sense. And even if we, and then if you read sources, you know, deeper into the Victorian period, if you go back, you'll often see these same kinds of arguments that people don't know about sex, that

that people are ignorant of their own bodies, and you see these arguments about obscenity, that medical books must be obscene. These books on venereal disease are obscene. So I think it's actually quite understandable that people kind of concluded, especially earlier in the historiography, that...

you know, people didn't know because they're just reading these sources. But I found an essay by the historian Kate Fisher really helpful for this, where she points out looking at a longer history that like saying that somebody is ignorant about something is a way to position yourself as somebody who knows and

Right. And that people were constantly told that they were ignorant of sex throughout the 19th century, partly because this is the period in which people are really positioning themselves as experts. Everyone from those kind of quacks who told people that they didn't know anything about their bodies and they should learn all about venereal disease by reading their book and then consult with them.

To kind of regular practitioners who are trying to make themselves and their field scientific and kind of to even pornographers telling people that they really need to know about contraception. They don't know, you know, they don't know how to have good sex. This is all about saying people are ignorant is really all about sex.

selling a sexual knowledge is something that they have and that other people don't and that society needs.

So I found and I've tried to build on this in my conclusion, especially kind of pointing out the ways in which the kind of more detailed history that I've looked at really kind of highlights that, that everybody kind of positions Victorians during the Victorian period as people who don't know about sex.

But this is fundamentally because they want to sell sexual information. So they're telling people this is not something that they have. So that's that's a big part of it. It's also about redefining what counts as knowledge. So prior to, you know, the late 18th century, you know, no.

Knowing about sex might involve things like sexual experience. It might involve kind of folklore. And in the 19th century, knowledge about sex itself is really, by these people who want to be seen as experts, is really defined as biological knowledge or scientific knowledge about sex. You can't necessarily know anything about sex just because you've had sex before.

You need to know about sex in a very particular kind of way that that an expert can can provide. I mean, I usually conclude these these episodes by saying there's like lots more we could have talked about. You know, the book is kind of much richer than the conversation. And that, you know, is true.

true when I say it, but it's particularly true about this book. There's lots and lots of discussions of things like obscenity trials. There's, you know, really kind of great and in some ways quite kind of innocent, sweet illustrations. Some of the material that might have been considered obscene or not is

from the period. And given the book is kind of so rich, and I urge listeners to go and read it, it seems a bit kind of cruel to say, so what are you working on kind of next? But it strikes me

There's a whole load of possible future research directions that could come from the book, but equally, it's also something where if you've worked on something in so much detail, you might be doing something quite different next. So yeah, what's coming now and next?

Oh, well, before I answer that, I'll work in a brief plug that a lot of the research and writing for this book was funded by the Wellcome Trust. So if you're interested in reading it but don't necessarily want to buy it, it'll be available as a free e-book. So you can simply download it. So please do that if you're interested. And the Wellcome funded that free publication.

What am I doing next? Oh, man. A few things. I think there are a couple of kind of side projects I've done that I've been working on that are kind of a spinoff of the book. One is about just an essay about condom retailing before the 1870s. So what did...

what did selling condoms look like earlier in the 19th century? Another is some data that I collected that's related to the book that I'd like to publish for people who really want to get into the weeds. They can look at kind of things like advertising data and hopefully that'll encourage more research.

At the same time, though, my next big project, which I've already started, actually takes off from the parts of the book that are really interested in the kind of constant recycling of material from different publications that the book looks at. So part of what the book looks at when it looks at the publishing angle is how...

how different authors and publishers are kind of reusing parts of other publications, creating new compilations out of old material, and how this kind of destabilizes what we think of as a Victorian medical book. A Victorian medical book might have like

quite old information in it. You know, a medical book published in 1870 might have, you know, text that was first written, you know, kind of in the 18th century or the early 19th century.

um within it that people just kind of copied so so my next major project looks more at um uh what i what i'm calling text reuse um in 19th century books um and and and the the how people reuse texts old texts to make new books um and and what the politics of that were