Main description:

Widely accepted as the world's first sex therapist, Dr Graham was devoted to the research of the effect of physical stimuli on the psyche, and more specifically on sexual activity. It was this that led him to invent his infamous Celestial Bed, a contraption akin to a torture rack, yet built with the intent to impart exquisite sexual pleasure rather than excruciating physical pain. Medicine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was generally more prone to inflict pain than to relieve it. Patients were bled, blistered, lanced, poked and chopped up, all with little or no anaesthesia, and it was the hurt administered by these methods which caused Graham to concern himself with the more "gentle" side of the profession.Unsurprisingly, such a concern was met with both outrage and controversy. Syson's biography is a truly emotive depiction of both the man himself and eighteenth-century society. By following him from his native Edinburgh to America and back again, "The Love Doctor" achieves a breadth not commonly found in biography, and renders an unforgettable portrait of a truly remarkable man.