James Graham (sexologist)

[3] James Graham, son of a saddler, was born on 23 June 1745 in Edinburgh, where he trained in medicine, but left medical school without taking a degree.

Probably with the help of William Buchan, future author of the best-seller Domestic Medicine, Graham set up as an apothecary in Doncaster, Yorkshire, and in 1764 he married Mary Pickering of Ackworth.

[5] Here he learned the principles of electricity from Ebenezer Kinnersley, Benjamin Franklin's friend and collaborator, and he later wrote that it was in Philadelphia that he began to develop the prototype of his Celestial Bed.

Leaving America around the time of the first rumblings of the American Revolution, he worked briefly in Bristol and then Bath before setting up practice in London, where Horace Walpole consulted him about his gout.

[6] Advertisements promoting cures using "Effluvia, Vapours and Applications ætherial, magnetic or electric" attracted his first celebrity patient, the historian Catharine Macaulay.

A tilting inner frame put couples in the best position to conceive, and their movements set off music from organ pipes which breathed out "celestial sounds", whose intensity increased with the ardour of the bed's occupants.

At the head of the bed, above a moving clockwork tableau celebrating Hymen, the god of marriage, and sparkling with electricity, were the words: "Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth!

"[7]At Schomberg House, Graham gave his Lecture on Generation, a frank explanation of how to conceive which saw sex as a patriotic act and procreation as a national duty.

His publications were distinguished by their flowery and hyperbolical rhetoric, and their humane and progressive views on war, slavery, women’s education, farming, religious tolerance and diet (he was a passionate vegetarian).