Professor Mary E. Fissell from Johns Hopkins University Department of the History of Medicine will discuss Aristotle's Masterpiece, a best-selling popular medical book about sex and reproduction that remained largely unchanged from its first publication in 1684 all the way into the 1930s.  Dr. Fissell’s talk introduces this popular book and its male and female readers. She will explore tensions between the book's early-modern model of kinship and newer ideas offered by a plethora of popular books about sex and marriage in the 19th century. She argues that the older model, reproduced in edition after edition, continued to have considerable appeal, especially for working-class women, for a range of social and cultural factors.

This event is being held in connection with the The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wall-Paper Exhibit