n In Sarah Bull's Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain, Bull investigates the intersection of medical texts and erotica, carefully weighing both "the licit and the illicit" (3) in order to trace the limits of obscenity as they can be discerned in Victorian medical publications. Drawing upon Victorian print culture as well as its emerging pornography industry, she engages directly with the problem of authority — that is, who could assert and enforce the difference between dignified and obscene material. By analyzing advertisements, legal rulings, and erotic texts, Bull posits that this struggle for authority ultimately gave rise to the persistent and significant myth of Victorian sexual ignorance.
In her first chapter, Bull lays historical groundwork concerning the Holywell Street Publishers booksellers and publishers that specialized in distributing pornographic works, as well as the ways in which pornography and medical texts were woven through the Holywell Street catalogue. Among the works that could be found on Holywell Street was The Secrets of Nature Revealed, which Bull singles out for special attention, lingering on its tantalizing imagery. In this volume, a woman is "lit by a candelabra" (22), coyly "clutching a bedsheet, as if it has just slipped" (22). Her inclusion of this description indeed establishes a sense of desire, but it is her following comparison that is especially unexpected. Bull likens the woman to the book itself, drawing an apt connection between "her exposed body" (22) and the book's "naked pages" (22). In Bull's reading, erotic texts become agents of desire that act to seduce their readers. With this idea of seduction in mind, Bull defines a crucial phrase that drives her central argument: medical eroticism. Medically erotic texts occupy a dual space, being simultaneously a means of bodily education as well as a source of arousal. Bull emphasizes her point through examining a wealth of Holywell's medically erotic texts and illustrations — drawings of the reproductive system, bare breasts, and diagrams of vulvas. In offering visual context, Bull masterfully demonstrates the lines between arousal and anatomical education as a whole.
In Chapter Two, Bull takes a closer look at the medically erotic by exploring figures whom she calls "irregular practitioners" — those who advertised their work as authentic but were not doctors, surgeons, or medical students. Despite their lack of professional credentials, these irregular practitioners readily wrote, published, and advertised pamphlets that were easily accessible to readers by way of pornographic booksellers and by mail order. Though these pamphlets were popular, their readership only served to further damage the reputation of irregular practitioners. Bull notes that because these pamphlets appealed to the middle class, they became "aligned" or associated "with the low social status" (58) of the uneducated commoner. While such pamphlets indeed provided accessible education about the body, irregular practitioners' intentions were not entirely noble; their texts were all but stolen from one another, resulting in an absurd merry-go-round of plagiarism. Bull offers an enlightening example of this when she compares Sir William Lawrence's Lectures on Surgery (1830) — a legitimate medical text — with J. L. Curtis's Manhood: The Causes of Its Premature Decline (1850), which Bull presents as a "cheap" manual (58). In a fruitful close reading, Bull extracts a paragraph from each text and compares them in order to demonstrate their similarity. The two works seem to bleed into one another, further blurring the lines between the real and the inauthentic.
Deeply threatened and offended by irregular practitioners' pamphlets, regular practitioners sought to reclaim authority over sexual texts, as Bull shows in her third chapter. According to Bull, they disagreed about how to achieve this aim. Proper rules of medical publication either did not exist or were vague at best, resulting in a field that was utterly "at war with itself" (93). Returning to the strange duality of medical erotica, Bull contrasts Holywell Street, which welcomed medical erotica, with regular practitioners who wanted to avoid it entirely; for the latter, legitimate texts related to the body were those that could in no way be mistaken for pornography. In this context, Bull argues, it became risky to publish works that could be interpreted as even marginally arousing. She draws upon the unfortunate case of Michael Ryan, a regular practitioner who fell victim to these pitfalls upon publishing The Philosophy of Marriage (1837). The volume was heavily scrutinized. His fellow practitioners perceived him as "pandering to prurient curiosity" (92) and displaying an uncouth "thirst for profit" (92). In other words, Ryan had accidentally aligned his work with the commercialized carnality of Holywell Street, and his text was treated as if it served primarily to excite the senses rather than as a source of valuable knowledge.
Having established the historical context of medical erotica and its prominent figures, Bull in her fourth chapter deals with all things obscene, and her investigations are both expansive and meticulous. In her previous chapters, she offered sources such as advertisements and visuals, but here she makes a surprising yet delightful pivot by bringing court cases into the conversation. According to Bull, at this time the legal meaning of obscenity was murky, indefinite, and therefore open to a wide variety of interpretations. Obscenity's vague nature enabled those with ulterior motives — such as regular practitioners whose goals were to limit pornography — to police the publishing industry and its distribution of printed materials. To emphasize this point, Bull briefly analyses the activities of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, describing their ineffective crusade against Holywell Street. More successful were the regular practitioners. They, too, leveraged the accusation of obscenity against irregular practitioners, accusing them of corrupting public morals. Decaying morals had little to do with their true motives, but they nonetheless used these complaints to snuff out irregular practitioners' pamphlets. Bull draws the reader's attention to a vital legal ruling concerning obscenity. In 1868 the case of R. v. Hicklin settled on what truly constituted obscenity, ruling that it was "not in relation to authorial intent" (150) but in how the text in question affected its readers. This ruling later gave rise to the Hicklin Test, a standard for determining whether or not a printed work was obscene.
Bull calls her next chapter "Dull Instead of Light," a fitting title for her analysis of the ways in which sexual medical texts became increasingly professionalized. In this chapter, she explores the lengths that regular practitioners went to in order to separate themselves from the purveyors of medical erotica. Of all the methods they used, Bull focuses on changes in rhetoric and aesthetic. Regular practitioners used language to make their texts inaccessible to the general public, adopting a dry tone specifically tailored to an audience of their peers. Further, Bull cites a strange yet humorous overcorrection. Some practitioners would go as far as to translate their potentially arousing work into Latin so that only medical men could comprehend it. Advertisements, too, grew scarce and "vanished from non-medical periodicals" (153).
In Chapter Six, Bull explores the presence of contraceptive manuals on Holywell Street, situating contraception within the framework of medical eroticism. She recounts its relationship with radical politics and traces its eventual rebranding as completely separate from pornography and erotica. Unlike The Secrets of Nature Revealed, contraceptive manuals were neither truly pornographic, nor did they center on sexual fantasies. While they were sold by Holywell Street publishers, they served as a means of bodily education and liberation. Even so, as Bull shows, the general public could not discern the difference between pornography and contraceptive manuals, and so such works were subject to similar accusations of obscenity. As Bull discusses advocates' efforts to distance information about contraception from pornography, she uses an intriguing phrase, describing the legitimate practitioner's worries of being "tainted" (185) by erotica. In order to avoid this almost infectious association, works about contraception needed to rebrand themselves as distinctly separate from pornography. The rebranding of contraception took on the values of freedom of speech and expression. Bull gives an example of this effort by citing the 1877 case of R. v. Bradlaugh and Besant, which challenged the Hicklin Test. This case was one that challenged the misconception that contraception was obscene, arguing that suppressing it was in fact a violation of people's freedom.
Chapter Seven handles the emergence of sexology and its struggle to assert itself as a respectable and legitimate field of study. Bull develops this chapter from her previous one, on the professionalization of medicine, in order to emphasize the field's now-developed rules. If sexology sought to be respected, then it must at minimum abide by the proper conventions. Bull observes that because sexology entailed elements of sociology — a soft science in a sea of what was then considered hard science — it was snubbed by the wider scientific community. Despite these setbacks, sexology grew from a niche study into a mature field of inquiry, and Bull shows how sexologists positioned their burgeoning field as crucial to a functional society. Sexologists, like contraception advocates, styled themselves as proponents of free expression, ones moreover that were badly needed (233). Bull argues that from this perspective, sexual desire was promoted as a natural drive that Victorians were forced to suppress. In turn, this suppression resulted in obscenity. With this analysis, Bull posits that "the myth of Victorian sexual ignorance" (215) became fully realized.
Especially fruitful are two points in Bull's analysis. Firstly, she states her interest in framing the Victorians themselves as readers of the medically erotic, the pornographic, and the obscene — but she admits to the "challenge of finding" (244) such first-hand reading accounts. Secondly, she explores the use of Victorian marketing as a factor in the development of the myth of Victorian sexual ignorance, claiming that the marketing tactics they utilized projected sexual ignorance upon readers — an ignorance that could only be fixed by buying their books. Throughout her work Bull has provided copious resources, both historical as well as from fellow scholars. Nonetheless, she candidly acknowledges the limits of her study when it comes to access to materials. While her research shows that medical erotica indeed existed and was accessible, much has also been lost to time. Furthermore, Bull observes that many first-hand accounts from readers came from those who were reading erotica for the first time. Because of this inexperience, she argues, they were more inclined to be shocked or scandalized, and the abundance of shocked responses leaves the impression that all Victorians were scandalized by, or at least unfamiliar with, erotica and pornography. Nor does Bull ignore the clever marketing on the publishers' parts. Material had to be eye-catching and exciting in order to sell.
In Selling Sexual Knowledge Bull supports her captivating argument with a wealth of historical scholarship. Bull's argument is both intricate and conveyed with clarity, and her inclusion of images, historical anecdotes, and legal rulings is especially impressive. Altogether Bull's book serves to humanize the publishing industry that grew up at the crossroads of medicine, erotica, and pornography — as well as the figures who were principally engaged in producing medically erotic texts.
Links to Related Material
- Sexual knowledge and print culture
- Contraception and birth control in Victorian Britain
- Victorian attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and sexual identity
- Amateur doctors and patent medicine
- The female body in the 19th century
- Sexuality and gender in Victorian illustration
Bibliography
[Book under review] Bull, Sarah. Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 306 pages. ISBN 978-1-00-9578103
Created 8 April 2026 Last modified 15 April 2026