Description
Little, Brown and Company, Published 1966. Hardcover, xiii, 366 pp.; 25 cm; First Edition, Third Printing (so stated on copyright page); illustrated with electrocardiogram tracings, charts, and tables; references, glossary, index.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
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Condition & notes
In Very Good condition, no dust jacket. Mustard yellow cloth boards with Little, Brown device blind-stamped on front board, maroon spine panel lettered in gilt. Light bumping to corners and edges, mild shelf wear with some spotting and soiling to boards, heavier on rear board. Binding tight. Mild toning to endpapers; otherwise pages clean and unmarked. The book that made sex a laboratory science. Begun in 1954 within the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine and continued from 1964 at Masters and Johnson's own Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis, the study observed 382 women and 312 men, aged 18 to 89, through an estimated 10,000 complete cycles of sexual response, recording heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and muscular and vascular changes with electrocardiographs and other instruments. Where Kinsey had asked people what they did, Masters and Johnson measured what their bodies did. The result was the four-phase model of excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution that still frames the field, the demonstration that Freud's distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasm had no physiological basis, and the first clinical data on sexual response in pregnancy and old age. Written in deliberately dry clinical prose for physicians, it nonetheless became a national best seller within weeks of its April 1966 publication and went through many printings that year; this third printing is among the earliest. The 1970 sequel, Human Sexual Inadequacy, founded modern sex therapy. Published in Great Britain by J. and A. Churchill. Contents: Preface; Acknowledgments; Research in Sexual Response: The Sexual Response Cycle; The Research Population; Female Sexual Response: Female Extragenital Response; Female External Genitalia; The Clitoris; The Vagina; The Artificial Vagina; The Uterus; The Female Orgasm; Pregnancy and Sexual Response; Male Sexual Response: Male Extragenital Reactions; The Penis; The Scrotum and the Testes; The Male Orgasm (Ejaculation); Geriatric Sexual Response: The Aging Female; The Aging Male; Generalities in Sexual Response: Similarities in Physiologic Response; Myotonia in Sexual Response; Study-Subject Sexuality; References; Glossary; Index.