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Aristotle’s Complete Master-Piece, in two parts: Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the generation of Man. Regularly digested into chapters, rendering it far more useful and easy than any yet extant. To which is added A Treasure of Health: or the Family Physician: Being choice and approved remedies for all the several distempers incident to the human body.

New England: Printed and sold by all the principal booksellers in the United States. 1811. 16mo, brown leather spine with blue paper over boards. [5], 12–78 pp., 5 woodcuts, 2.5” x 2”.

The scarce stated “Sixth New-England Edition” of this immensely popular treatise on human sexuality.

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.”

Born of a competitive glut of pregnancy and midwifery books in the 17th 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.

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.

Similarly:

when a married couple, from a desire of having children, are about to make use of those means that nature ordained to that purpose, it would be very proper to cherish the body with generous restoratives, that so it may be brisk and vigorous; and if their imaginations were charmed with sweet and melodious airs, and cares and thoughts of business drowned in a glass of racy wine, that their spirits may be raised to the highest pitch or ardour and joy, it would not be amiss. For any thing of sadness, trouble and sorrow, are enemies to the delights of Venus. And if at any such time of coition, there should be conception, it would have a malevolent effect upon children.

Scarce. OCLC records just four copies.

REFERENCES: Shaw, R.R. American Bibliography 22206; Early American Medical Imprints 56; Fissell, Mary E. “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in “Aristotle’s Masterpiece”, The William and Mary Quarterly , vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 43–74.

CONDITION: Good, rubbed, covers worn at edges with some loss of paper, paste-down and flyleaf damp-stained, foxed, caption for one cut printed on a torn and turned up piece of lower margin, but all text present.

Item #4114

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