[Aristotle] - Aristotle's Masterpiece...Marriage... Birth... Midwives...Female Sex... - 1811

Aristotle's Master-Piece Completed in Two Parts. The First containing the Secrets of Generation in all the Parts thereof. Treating of the benefit of Marriage, and the prejudices of unequal matches. Signs of insufficiency in men or women of the infusion of the soul. Of the likeness of children to parents, of monstrous births. The cause and cure of the Green Sickness. A discourse of Virginity. Directions and causions for Midwives. The use and action of the Genitals, fabric of the Womb. Signs of Conception. The second part being a private Looking Glass for the Female Sex. Treating various Maladias of the Womb, and of all other distempers incident to women of all ages. New York: Printed for the Company of Flying Stationers. [1811]

12mo: 126 pages, with woodcut frontispiece and woodcuts in text. The printing and the quality of paper have conspired after two centuries to make most pages tones and foxed. But the work is -- amazingly -- complete.

The date of 1811 is given by Robert B. Austin, Early American medical imprints: a guide to works printed in the United States, 1668-1820 (Washington DC, 1961), in which the book appears as item 67.

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Aristotle’s Masterpiece was the bestselling book about sex and reproduction on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean from the late 17th to the early 20th century—but the book isn’t by Aristotle, and it’s not usually considered a masterpiece. First printed in London in 1684, it was imported to the American colonies and then became a staple of early publishing in the United States, going into hundreds of editions.

An anonymous writer compiled the book from several earlier texts. He or she borrowed the name “Aristotle” to make the work seem scientific when the book was first published. It was still for sale in London’s Soho sex shops right up into the 1930s. Primarily a late 17th-century manual on pregnancy and childbirth—an early-modern precursor to today’s perennial bestseller What To Expect When You’re Expecting—the book endorses sexual pleasure but also includes images of deformed infants, or so-called “monster babies.” This seemingly bizarre combination of contents contributed to the book’s long-lasting appeal.

The book itself was pasted together in 1684, a mash-up of earlier works on midwifery and natural philosophy. It was an almost immediate bestseller. While John How, its first publisher, obediently registered the work with the Stationers’ Company, the book soon slipped the traces of any form of regulation; it was pirated in its very first year of publication. It was produced in multiple versions by a host of printers and publishers, only some of whom were willing to put their names on the title pages of the works. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were more editions of the Masterpiece than all other popular works on reproduction combined. It continued to sell steadily until the 1870s in North America, when its publication was curtailed by the Comstock Acts. In Britain, it was still being reprinted into the 1930s.

And it wasn’t just the title. The frontispiece (often missing) generally features either a near-naked woman or (as here) an elderly man -- probably a rake -- reflecting on his life and on the consequences of a life of sinful sex.

Aristotle’s Master-Piece is a fascinatingly diverse volume, its two parts running the gamut from titillating accounts of emerging adolescent sexual desire, step-by-step guides on how to conceive a specific gender of child, and a detailed description of female and male genitalia, to advice on recognizing the early signs of pregnancy, directions for difficult births, and treatments and descriptions of “the several Maladies incident to the womb.”

Particularly fascinating about the Master-Piece is its treatment of “monster births”: this volume includes depictions of, among other deformities, a child completely covered in hair, a set of conjoined twins, a child with four arms and four legs, and a child who from the waist up is human, but from the waist down is a dog—the horrifying offspring of a woman who copulated with a dog. These monstrous births, and indeed all undesirable traits in children, are consistently traced back to the parents’ mistakes, either in their copulation procedure (all the more reason to follow the book’s directions) or their mental states:

''it is certain, that monstrous births often happen by means of undue copulation: For some there are, who having been long absent from each other, and having an eager desire for enjoyment, consider not as they ought… And if it happens that they come together, when the woman’s menses are flowing, and proceed to the act of copulation, the issue of such copulation does often prove monstrous, as a just punishment for doing what nature forbids…and though such copulations do not always produce monstrous births, yet the children then begotten, are generally heavy, dull and sluggish, and defective in their understanding, wanting the vivacity and liveness which children got in proper seasons, are endued with...''

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This Dirty Book of the Early Modern Period was sold furtively by country peddlers and in general stores and taverns; regular booksellers seldom advertised it, though they usually had it under the counter. Mary Fissell (in Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in "Aristotle's Masterpiece". The William and Mary Quarterly 60, 2003: 43-74. ) writes that "this small book became the best-selling guide to pregnancy and childbirth ... going into more editions than all other popular works on the topic combined."

There were many variants of this book with titles such as:

Aristotle's Master-Piece Completed;
Treasure of health, or, The family physician.
Family physician.
Aristotle's compleat masterpiece. etc etc.

Born of a competitive glut of pregnancy and midwifery books in the 18th Century, Aristotle’s Master-Piece outlasted its contemporaries and underwent numerous editions and printings over the next 200 or more years, first in England and then in the United States. Probably owing to the 1595 co-opting of his name in a question-and-answer sex ed. book, 'Aristotle’ was widely regarded as a sex expert in early modern England, his name came to offer the double reassurance of coital expertise and Classical wisdom. As medical knowledge advanced in the 20th Century, Aristotle’s Master-Piece became less a successful amalgam of contemporary medical wisdom and more a relic of soft porn and a back-street introduction to sex.

As an early American imprint and being complete, this is a rare survivor from an age when such books were prohibited, could not be open sold or sent, and when a copy such as this one would have been read in great secrecy!