Book Review : Doctor of love: James Graham and his celestial bed

It is no easy matter to situate a man who cared more for celebrity and marketing than science or medicine within the history of medicine. Yes, James Graham (1745–94) was a quack, but this epithet hardly captures his ability to exploit scientific ideas for commercial gain. And how does one take seriously his use of medical ideas? More critically, how does one recognize how Graham was shaped by and shaped the science of his time? In her canny and erudite new book, Lydia Syson presents Graham as the first sex therapist, showman, and entrepreneur. She navigates a tightrope between Graham as huckster and Graham as physician, and in the process, raises important questions for the history of medicine. At a time when the grand narratives of science are being replaced by more contingent and localized public cultures of science, the career of James Graham is ripe for reconsideration. Syson’s early chapters usefully detail James Graham’s medical training and education. Doctoring, she reminds us, was a business and a profession, and payment was the only requirement for taking classes if one did not expect to graduate. Most did not. Even when one graduated, it was possible simply to pay someone to write your dissertation. She speculates that Robert Whytt, a teacher at the University of Edinburgh, was the source for Graham’s fascination with the body’s influence on the soul. Graham managed to get William Buchan, author of one of the most widely sold medical reference books, to act as his patron. In America, Syson argues, Graham would turn to Ebenezer Kinnersley, a Baptist minister, to learn about the medical uses of electricity. Syson’s piece de resistance is, of course, Graham’s famous celestial “medico, magnetico, musico, electrical” bed (p. 181), the one that cost £50 per night and guaranteed conception. She shows London awash in visible spectacle. Deciding to expand to the West End, Graham took on Schomberg House, then quickly renamed it the Temple of Prolific Hymen. To link it with fine art as opposed to vulgar showmanship, Graham borrowed Philippe De Loutherbourg’s use of lighted transparencies. He surrounded the bed with 1500 pounds of magnets, taking advantage of longstanding connections of magnets with sexual attraction, including William Harvey’s idea that semen had magnetic force. To bolster the science behind the bed, Graham published alleged accounts of successful treatment in his Medical Transactions; Syson does not mention that he stole the title from the Royal Society’s official publication. His lectures on generation, moreover, straddled the highly permeable line between medicine and erotica. Eventually he was jailed for promoting lasciviousness. Syson’s limpid prose whets the appetite for more. How did Graham persuade his audiences of his therapeutic effects? While Syson deftly shows how Graham sought to use every resource in his powers to overwhelm the senses of his patients, including chemicals like laughing gas, the music of Franklin’s glass harmonica, and the svelte beauty of Emy Lyon (later Emma Hamilton), playing the Goddess of Health, she might have considered more the gap between sensuous effects and belief in a cure. Coleridge, of course, invented the term “psychosomatic,” and although she uses this term, she might have done more to think about why the psychosomatic acquires such influence during this period. Likewise, recently historians of science have begun to credit this period with the development of controlled experiments, and Graham’s commercial success certainly fuelled a desire to subject therapies to rigorous proof. Finally, much more could be said about the notion of health in this period, especially since Graham advertised his place as the Temple of Health. Despite these lapses, this entertaining and thoughtful book reminds us of the strangeness and familiarity of the eighteenth-century medical world. In so doing, it shows the costs and benefits of our grand narratives which have long relegated Graham to the fringes of the Enlightenment.