Frances Wilson
THE MAGNET OF LOVE
Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed
By Lydia Syson (Alma Books 331pp £20)

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'Young, enterprising, impatient and eccentric', as he described himself, Dr James Graham took pleasure seriously. But then, he reminded his patients, 'I am not only a doctor of medicine, but a physician of the soul.' The first sex therapist, Graham was also a consummate showman, brilliantly skilled, as Lydia Syson puts it in this fine biography, in 'translating sexual knowledge into polite and rational entertainment'.

Aside from his striking appearance - Walter Scott described his hair as 'most marvellously draped into a sort of double toupee, which divided upon his head like the two tops of Parnassus' - there was nothing unusual about James Graham. Like the electrometers he displayed in his Temple of Health, he simply responded to what was going on around him. The eighteenth century was 'stuffed with little men trying to make it big in a vibrantly commercial world', and Graham, like the best of them, rose to vertiginous heights before falling to cavernous depths; he was briefly famous, then notorious, after which he died in poverty and was soon forgotten.

After completing his medical training in Edinburgh, the Athens of the modern world, Graham left his young wife behind and joined the 'wave of itinerant European culture-mongers' crossing the Atlantic to hawk their expertise. In America he established himself as King of the Quacks at a time when, as one American historian has put it, quacks were like locusts in Egypt. He was successfully promoting himself as a man who could make the blind see and the deaf hear when he came across Benjamin Franklin's electrical experiments. Lightning-like, Graham was 'suddenly struck with the thought, that the pleasure of the venereal act might be exalted or rendered more intense, if performed under the glowing, accelerating, and most genial influences of that heaven-born, all-animating element or principle, the electrical or concocted fire'.

Graham thought in metaphor - sexual attraction was an electrical charge; semen was 'the magnet of love' - but the analogy between the sexual and the electrical was not his own. The connection was already so popular that it had even found its way into John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which has Fanny Hill discoursing on 'that principle of electricity which scarce ever fails of producing fire, when the sexes meet'.

Producing fire when the sexes meet was the idea behind Graham's celestial bed, an early version of which he promoted in Philadelphia. By replacing the legs with pillars of glass to insulate it from the ground and running a manually operated electrical machine, he created a stage on which conception could take place. Graham's interest was in procreation: 'Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth' was his motto, and his reputation was sealed when his first customer, who had failed to conceive after many years of marriage, rose from the bed happily pregnant. The therapeutic effect may, Syson suggests, have been a result of the titillating voyeurism of the whole procedure. As the couple got under the covers, the doctor was cranking away behind a partition. The presence of partitions was part of the furniture of eighteenth-century pornography; Fanny Hill spends as much time secreted behind bedroom screens in a state of arousal as she does in bed.

Flushed with success, Graham returned to England where he gained an unlikely supporter in the celebrated historian, Catherine Macaulay. The press could not believe their luck: the bluestocking and the charlatan had joined forces, and while Macaulay's reputation sank, Graham's soared. When Catherine, in her late forties, married his 21-year-old brother, Graham had all the proof he needed that he was able to rejuvenate the sexuality of older women. Soon the ubiquitous duchess, Georgiana, was taking his advice.

Graham's great emporium, the Temple of Health, which stood next door to David Garrick's house on the Thames, was a hotch-potch of swirling smells and scientific paraphernalia like electrometers, lodestones, rods, tubes and magnets. At the door were two vast porters, dubbed by Londoners Gog and Magog. The crowds flocked to the Temple as they would to a show; Emma Lyon, before she became Lady Hamilton, was paid to pose as an image of the perfect woman, possessing (so the audience could assume) what Graham saw as the indicator of health: a 'cold, glowing, full, liquid, balmy firmness of the genital parts'.

Soon he was making enough money to open the Temple of Prolific Hymen in which he could house his 'medico, magnetico, musico, electrical bed', guaranteed to 'insure the removal of barrenness ... but likewise to improve, exalt, and invigorate the bodily, and through them, the mental faculties of the human species'. For £50 a night, couples lay on a mattress stuffed, in true Graham style, with wild oats and hair from the tails of stallions, gazing up at a vast dome containing the figures of Cupid and Psyche. Odours and essences, which may have contained ether or nitrous oxide (laughing gas), were exuded while mechanical music was piped out of the pillars from an organ incorporated in the bed's head.

So how did Mrs Graham feel about all this? 'One of the many frustrations in piecing together a life from such fragments', Syson says, 'is the fact that ... some of the big questions can never be answered.' It would be fascinating to know something about this woman and their marriage; Syson speculates that Graham was a faithful husband, whose understanding of sexual pleasure was not drawn from pornography but his own marital experience. What happened to Mrs Graham after he ran into debt, lost everything, became a religious maniac and died in his late forties, we don't know.

James Graham's role, Syson argues, was similar to that of today's health gurus. She is surely right: he was empathetic and relaxing whilst employing a language his patients found mysterious and seductive. Health and sex are faddish and bound to various faddish discourses: Graham took the eighteenth-century obsession with all things sublime into the bedroom, suggesting to his fashion-conscious clients that transporting experiences could be found not only in grand landscapes but in their own bodies. Wordsworth gave us the egotistic sublime, and Graham the sexual sublime; Lydia Syson has given us a highly enjoyable peep from behind the partition at one of the eighteenth century's weirdest and most wonderful figures.