Lecture on 1745 sex book: 'Aristotle' meets Dr. Ruth

Up there with the Holy Bible, one of the most popular and best-known books in 1745 was a work called

Aristotle's Masterpiece

. It was not as erudite as its title sounds: Historian of medicine Mary Fissell says it mixed elements of

The Joy of Sex

with the wackiness of the Weekly World News.

And it wasn't written by the towering figure of ancient Greek philosophy. The mega-seller appears to have been cribbed from 16th-century writings on sex and reproduction. The title, Fissell said, was pure marketing.

Fissell, of Johns Hopkins University, will dish the dirt on this colonial-era sex manual in a free lecture at 6:15 tonight at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 S. 22d St.

To compare it to a sex manual "is a bit of a tease," acknowledged Fissell, since it didn't give directions for techniques or positions. That wisdom wouldn't come for a couple more centuries, she said, but Aristotle's Masterpiece did advocate sexual pleasure for men and women.

The Brits created this blockbuster, which was first printed in London in 1684 and remained a phenomenon on both sides of the pond through the 1700s, said Fissell, who is writing a book.

The way the manual concentrated sexual material in one place made it popular, she said. "There's also a picture of a naked woman," she said. "That probably helped."

The book wasn't completely divorced from Aristotle, since he did lay out much of what was known about biology through the Middle Ages. But it took some liberties with his ideas.

Aristotle taught that during sex, men planted the seed that transmitted a sort of blueprint of a baby's traits. Women simply provided the raw material - the soil. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates held that men and women both contributed seeds. Aristotle's Masterpiece leaned toward Hippocrates.

The book reveals some surprising beliefs, Fissell said. The idea of "maternal imagination" held that a woman's thoughts at the time of conception could influence a baby's traits.

"If a woman was committing adultery, the baby wouldn't necessarily look like the milkman if she kept her husband's image in her mind while having sex," Fissell said. "Though that does sort of defeat the purpose."

The book suggests that women were the lustier of the sexes. "Female sexual desire was part of nature," Fissell said. Though it doesn't explicitly discuss female orgasm, she said, it does explain that men and women experience sex in similar ways.

The book also dwelled on "monstrosities" - babies or children with unusual traits. Many combined elements of other animals - like early versions of the "bat boy," a staple of the Weekly World News.

Other historians agree that Aristotle's Masterpiece was all the rage. "Everybody knew about it. It had a great underground reputation with little boys in particular," Temple University historian Susan Klepp said.

Klepp said that even in the 1700s, women were starting to think about sexual freedom - or at least the freedom to enjoy their husbands without having to bear 12 children.

The author of Aristotle's Masterpiece remains unknown, but Fissell suspects a team effort. In London, someone clipped just the naughty bits from two works of natural history dating back to the 1500s, she said.

The book was primarily aimed at women, Fissell said, since it was full of information about pregnancy, birth, and early child care.

In one case, in mid-18th-century Northampton, Mass., a scandal erupted when a group of boys used what they had learned about female anatomy from the book to tease girls, Fissell said.

It was ironic, she said, that during the height of the book's popularity, the scientific revolution had started to push aside Aristotle's Earth-centric cosmology.

"At the same time his philosophy was losing ground," she said, "Aristotle was morphing into Dr. Ruth."