Adam Phillips writes:

Suction pumps, Erector-Sleighs, Gassensche Spirales, Gerson’s Constriction Bandage and Virility (‘a double cylinder connected to a bellows to produce a vacuum that . . . “gives great bulk to the penis and makes it look grotesque”’) were all available and purchased, even though, like most of the cures for impotence that Angus McLaren describes in his panoramic study, there was very little ‘evidence’ that they worked. And yet it was, and still is, difficult to staunch the flow of more or less magical solutions for the perennial problem. ‘The market is flooded with various appliances which are guaranteed to be sure cures,’ a progressive physician grumbled in 1912. ‘It goes without saying that most of them are worthless frauds.’ What has also gone without saying, McLaren shows, is that the untold history of impotence is a history of many things, most obviously of gender relations, but less obviously – and this is implicit in his book, rather than spelled out – of our will to believe.

(LRB 5 July 2007)

Chicago | hardback 332 pp. |ISBN: 9780226500768