by Bill Bryson
For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned. In William Shakespeare’s day a decent canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. Because they were such treasured items, the best bed was often kept downstairs, sometimes in the living room, where it could be better shown off to visitors or seen through an open window by passersby. Generally, such beds were notionally reserved for really important visitors but in practice were hardly used, a fact that adds some perspective to the famous clause in Shakespeare’s will in which he left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne. This has often been construed as an insult, when in fact the second-best bed was almost certainly the marital one and therefore the one with the most tender associations. Why Shakespeare singled out that particular bed for mention is a separate mystery, since Anne would in the normal course of things have inherited all the household beds, but it was by no means the certain snub that some interpretations have made it.
Privacy was a much different concept in former times. In inns, sharing beds remained common into the nineteenth century, and diaries frequently contain entries lamenting how the author was disappointed to find a late-arriving stranger clambering into bed with him. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were required to share a bed at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1776, and passed a grumpy and largely sleepless night squabbling over whether to have the window open or not.
Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed. The records make clear that King Henry V’s steward and chamberlain both were present when he bedded Catherine of Valois. Samuel Pepys’s diaries show that a servant slept on the floor of his and his wife’s bedroom, and that he regarded her as a kind of living burglar alarm. In such circumstances, bed curtains provided a little privacy and cut down on drafts, too, but increasingly came to be seen as unhealthy refuges of dust and insects. Bed curtains could also be a fire hazard—no small consideration when everything in the bedroom, from the rush matting on the floor to the thatch overhead, was energetically combustible. Nearly every household book cautioned against reading by candlelight in bed, but many people did anyway.
In one of his works, John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century historian, relates an anecdote concerning the marriage of Thomas More’s daughter Margaret to a man named William Roper. In the story Roper calls one morning and tells More that he wishes to marry one of More’s daughters—either one will do—upon which More takes Roper to his bedroom, where the daughters are asleep in a truckle bed wheeled out from beneath the parental bed.* Leaning over, More deftly takes “the sheet by the corner and suddenly whippes it off,” Aubrey relates with words that all but glisten lustily, revealing the girls to be fundamentally naked. Groggily protesting at the disturbance, they roll onto their stomachs, and after a moment’s admiring reflection Sir William announces that he has seen both sides now and with his stick lightly taps the bottom of sixteen-year-old Margaret. “Here was all the trouble of the wooeing,” writes Aubrey with clear admiration.
However true or not the episode—and it is worth noting that Aubrey was writing more than a century after the fact—what is clear is that no one in his day thought it odd that More’s grown daughters would sleep beside the parental bed.
The real problem with beds, certainly by the Victorian period, was that they were inseparable from that most troublesome of activities, sex. Within marriage, sex was of course sometimes necessary. Mary Wood-Allen, in the popular and influential What a Young Woman Ought to Know, assured her young readers that it was permissible to take part in physical intimacies within marriage, so long as it was done “without a particle of sexual desire.” The mother’s moods and musings at the time of conception and throughout pregnancy were thought to affect the fetus profoundly and irremediably. Partners were advised not to have intercourse unless they were “in full sympathy” with each other at the time, for fear of producing a failed child.
To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary. Educating them was not simply a waste of time and resources but dangerously bad for their delicate constitutions. In 1865, John Ruskin opined in an essay that women should be educated just enough to make themselves practically useful to their spouses, but no further. Even the American educator Catharine Beecher, who was by the standards of the age a radical feminist, argued passionately that women should be accorded full and equal educational rights, so long as it was recognized that they would need extra time to do their hair.
For men, the principal and preoccupying challenge was not to spill a drop of seminal fluid outside the sacred bounds of marriage—and not much there either, if they could decently manage it. As one authority explained, seminal fluid, when nobly retained within the body, enriched the blood and invigorated the brain. The consequence of discharging this natural elixir illicitly was to leave a man literally enfeebled in mind and body. So even within marriage one should be spermatozoically frugal, as more frequent sex produced “languid” sperm, which resulted in listless offspring. Monthly intercourse was recommended as a safe maximum.
Self-abuse was of course out of the question at all times. The well-known consequences of masturbation covered virtually every undesirable condition known to medical science, not excluding insanity and premature death. Self-polluters—“poor creeping tremulous, pale, spindle-shanked wretched creatures who crawl upon the earth,” as one chronicler described them—were to be pitied. “Every act of self-pollution is an earthquake—a blast—a deadly paralytic stroke,” declared one expert. Case studies vividly drove home the risks. A medical man named Samuel Tissot described how one of his patients drooled continuously, dripped watery blood from his nose, and “defecated in his bed without noticing it.” It was those last three words that were particularly crushing.
Worst of all, an addiction to self-abuse would automatically be passed on to offspring, so that every incident of wicked pleasure not only softened one’s own brain but sapped the vitality of generations yet unborn. The most thorough analysis of sexual hazards, not to mention most comprehensive title, was provided by Sir William Acton in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in Their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations, first published in 1857. He it was who decided that masturbation would lead to blindness. He was also responsible for the oft-quoted assertion: “I should say that the majority of women are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”
Such beliefs held sway for an amazingly long time. “Many of my patients told me that their first masturbatory act took place while witnessing some musical show,” Dr. William Robinson reported grimly, and perhaps just a bit improbably, in a 1916 work on sexual disorders.
Fortunately, science was standing by to help. One remedy, described by Mary Roach in Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science (2008), was the Penile Pricking Ring, developed in the 1850s, which was slipped over the penis at bedtime (or indeed anytime) and was lined with metal prongs that bit into any penis that impiously swelled beyond a very small range of permissible deviation. Other devices used electrical currents to jerk the subject into a startled but penitent wakefulness.
Not everyone agreed with these conservative views, it must be noted. As early as 1836, a French medical authority named Claude François Lallemand published a three-volume study equating frequent sex with robust health. This so impressed a Scottish medical expert named George Drysdale that he formulated a philosophy of free love and uninhibited sex called Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion. Published in 1855, it sold ninety thousand copies and was translated into eleven languages, “including Hungarian,” as the Dictionary of National Biography notes with its usual charming emphasis on pointless detail. Clearly, there was some kind of longing for grea
ter sexual freedom in society. Unfortunately, society at large was still a century or so away from granting it.
Penile Pricking Ring (photo credit 15.1)
In such a perpetually charged and confused atmosphere, it is perhaps little wonder that for many people successful sex was an unrealizable aspiration—and in no case more resoundingly than that of John Ruskin himself. In 1848, when the great art critic married nineteen-year-old Euphemia “Effie” Chalmers Gray, things got off to a bad start and never recovered. The marriage was never consummated. As she later related, Ruskin confessed to her that “he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening.”
Eventually able to take no more (or actually wanting to take a lot more, but with someone else), Effie filed a nullity suit against Ruskin, the details of which became a happy titillation for devotees of the popular press in many lands, and then ran off with the artist John Everett Millais, with whom she had a happy life and eight children. The timing of her virtual elopement with Millais was unfortunate, as Millais was at that time engaged in painting a portrait of Ruskin. Ruskin, a man of honor, continued to sit for Millais, but the two men never again spoke. Ruskin sympathizers, of whom there were many, responded to the scandal by pretending there wasn’t one. By 1900, the whole episode had been so effectively expunged from the record that W. G. Collingwood could, without a blush of embarrassment, write The Life of John Ruskin without hinting that Ruskin had ever been married, much less sent crashing from a room at the sight of female pubic hair.
Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn “under a certain condition of insanity,” and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbing posterity of several priceless works.
Effie Ruskin’s escape from her unhappy marriage was both lucky and unusual, for nineteenth-century divorce acts, like everything else to do with marriage, were overwhelmingly biased in favor of men. To obtain a divorce in Victorian England, a man had merely to show that his wife had slept with another man. A woman, however, had to prove that her spouse had compounded his infidelity by committing incest, bestiality, or some other dark and inexcusable transgression drawn from a very small list. Until 1857, a divorcée forfeited all her property and generally lost the children, too. Indeed, in law a wife had no rights at all—no right to property, no right of expression, no freedoms of any kind beyond those her husband chose to grant her. According to the great legal theorist William Blackstone, upon marriage a woman relinquished her “very being or legal existence.” A wife had no legal personhood at all.
Some countries were slightly more liberal than others. In France, exceptionally, a woman could divorce a man on grounds of adultery alone, though only as long as the infidelity had occurred in the marital home. In England, however, standards were brutally unfair. In one well-known case, a woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually, he infected her with gonorrhea and then poisoned her almost to the point of death by slipping antivenereal powders into her food without her knowledge. Her health and spirit broken, she sued for divorce. The judge listened carefully to the arguments, then dismissed the case and sent Mrs. Robinson home with instructions to try to be more patient.
Even when things went well, it was difficult being a woman, for womanhood was automatically deemed to be a pathological condition. There was a belief, more or less universal, that women after puberty were either ill or on the verge of being ill almost permanently. The development of breasts, womb, and other reproductive apparatus “drained energy from the finite supply each individual possessed,” in the words of one authority. Menstruation was described in medical texts as if it were a monthly act of willful negligence. “Whenever there is actual pain at any stage of the monthly period, it is because something is wrong either in the dress, or the diet, or the personal and social habits of the individual,” wrote one (male, of course) observer.
The painful irony is that women frequently were unwell because considerations of decorum denied them proper medical care. In 1856, when a young Boston housewife from a respectable background tearfully confessed to her doctor that she sometimes found herself involuntarily thinking of men other than her husband, the doctor ordered a series of stringent emergency measures, which included cold baths and enemas, the removal of all stimulus, including spicy foods and the reading of light fiction, and the thorough scouring of her vagina with borax. Light fiction was commonly held to account for promoting morbid thoughts and a tendency to nervous hysteria. As one author gravely summarized: “Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months or even years before she should.”
As late as 1892, Judith Flanders reports, a man who took his wife to have her eyes tested was told that the problem was a prolapsed womb and that until she had a hysterectomy her vision would remain impaired.
Sweeping generalizations were about as close as any medical man would permit himself to get to women’s reproductive affairs. This could have serious medical consequences, since no doctor could make a proper gynecological examination. In extremis, he might probe gently beneath a blanket in an underlit room, but this was highly exceptional. For the most part, women who had any medical complaint between neck and knees were required to point blushingly to the affected area on a dummy.
One American physician in 1852 cited it as a source of pride that “women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored.” Some doctors opposed forceps delivery on the grounds that it allowed women with small pelvises to bear children, thus passing on their inferiorities to their daughters.
The inevitable consequence of all this was that ignorance of female anatomy and physiology among medical men was almost medieval. The annals of medicine hold no better example of professional gullibility than the celebrated case of Mary Toft, an illiterate rabbit breeder from Godalming, in Surrey, who for a number of weeks in the autumn of 1726 managed to convince medical authorities, including two physicians to the royal household, that she was giving birth to a series of rabbits. The matter became a national sensation. Several of the medical men attended the births and professed total amazement. It was only when yet another of the king’s physicians, a German named Cyriacus Ahlers, investigated more closely and pronounced the whole matter a hoax that Toft at last admitted the deception. She was briefly imprisoned for fraud but then sent home to Godalming, and that was the last that anyone ever heard of her.
An understanding of female anatomy and physiology was still a long way off, however. As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman’s touch could spoil a ham. Judith Flanders notes that one British doctor was struck off the medical register for noting in print that a change in coloration around the vagina soon after conception was a useful indicator of pregnancy. The conclusion was entirely valid; the problem was that it could be discerned only by looking. The doctor was never allowed to practice again. In America, meanwhile, James Platt White, a respected gynecologist, was expelled from the American Medical Association for allowing his students to observe a woman—with her permission—give birth.
Against this, the actions of a surgeon named Isaac Baker Brown become all the more extraordinary. In an age in which doctors normally didn’t go within an arm’s length of a woman’s reproductive zone and would have little idea of what they had found if they went there, Baker Brown became a pioneering gynecological surgeon. Unfortunate
ly, he was motivated almost entirely by seriously disturbed notions. In particular, he grew convinced that nearly every female malady was the result of “peripheral excitement of the pudic nerve centring on the clitoris.” Put more bluntly, he thought women were masturbating and that this was the cause of insanity, epilepsy, catalepsy, hysteria, insomnia, and countless other nervous disorders. The solution was to remove the clitoris surgically and thus take away any possibility of wayward excitation. He also developed the conviction that the ovaries were mostly bad and were better off removed. Since no one had ever tried to remove ovaries before, it was an exceptionally delicate and risky operation. Baker Brown’s first three patients died on the operating table. Undaunted, he performed his fourth experimental operation on, of all people, his sister. She lived.
When it was discovered that he had for years been removing women’s clitorises without their permission or knowledge, the reaction of the medical community was swift and furious. Baker Brown was expelled from the Obstetrical Society of London, which effectively ended his ability to practice. On the plus side, doctors did at last accept that it was time to become scientifically attentive to the private parts of female patients. So ironically, by being such a poor doctor and dreadful human being, Baker Brown did more than any other person to bring the study and practice of female medicine up to modern standards.
II
There was, it must be said, one very sound reason for being fearful of sex in the premodern era: syphilis. There has never been a more appalling disease, at least for the unlucky portion who get what is known as third-stage syphilis. This is a milestone you just don’t want to experience. Syphilis gave sex a real dread. To many, it seemed a clear message from God that sex outside the bounds of marriage was an invitation to divine retribution.
