The Trials of Frederick Hollick: Obscenity, Sex Education, and Medical Democracy in the Antebellum United States

In the spring of 1846 a large audience gathered to hear what promised to be a hotly contested lecture. Speakers on the lyceum circuit that year had tackled national controversies such as the antislavery movement and the American war against Mexico. In Philadelphia Dr. Frederick Hollick's anatomy lessons had stirred equally passionate reactions. Hollick had promised to reveal the "Origin of Life," and now he stood poised next to a naked woman.

Unlike the women in his audience, she was made of papier-mâché—this was "the large anatomical model" that these respectable men and women of Philadelphia had come togetherand paid to see. The "completeness, and accuracy," of the model, Hollick promised, "is astonishing . . . so true is the whole to nature, that many have even fainted away at a first view, from the impression that they were viewing a real body!"¹ While the doctor spoke to a hushed crowd about the pleasures of "the generative act" and the marvels of pregnancy, he dissected the model before their eyes. The audience's gaze fastened upon the body as they listened to the doctor lecture on sexual function as well as anatomy. Peeling back the layers of the papier-mâché woman, he also professed to reveal hidden information about sex. In fact, Hollick argued that frequent sexual pleasure constituted a physiological necessity for all postpubescent human beings, regardless of gender or marital status, a stance that he insisted was medical but that his enemies deemed obscene.

Published the same year, The Origin of Life collected Hollick's first courses of popular lectures and disseminated their messages about sex to still wider audiences. But the book's graphic descriptions of genital anatomy, (hetero)sexual ecstasy, and autoeroticism also caught the unfavorable attention of Philadelphia's district attorney. The obscenity trial that ensued targeted both the book and the lectures, placing Hollick and his audiences at the center of several interconnecting boundary disputes. Who could speak about medicine, health, and the body? Should sex be discussed at all in a public forum? What criteria should be used to distinguish between a medical lecture on sexual health and an obscene speech? Did the title "doctor" empower a speaker to advocate for a liberalization of contemporary sexual mores?

This essay will use the trials of Frederick Hollick as the entry point to explore the sexual politics inherent in the popular health movement, which dominated discussions of American medicine for the first half of the nineteenth century.² Usually understood primarily as a form of widespread resistance to medical professionalization, the movement also developed into the first wave of public sex education in America. Therefore, popular health can properly be understood as a social movement that brought sexuality into the public sphere, often appropriating a medical idiom to challenge conservative sex and gender arrangements. The most daring lecturers of the 1840s and 1850s critiqued the institution of marriage from the health reform podium.³

Moreover, as the response to Hollick's trials reveals, ordinary people shaped popular health discourse according to their own desires, both through their patterns of consumption and their vocal defense of public sex education. Listeners and readers, especially married women, relished many of the promises that underlay lecture topics: women's capability to control their own health, the importance of equal access to scientific and medical education, prescriptions for sexual health that highlighted women's agency and contraceptive advice. The self-consciously masculine drive to overthrow "medical monopoly" and make "every man his own doctor" that had animated Jacksonian health reformers such as John C. Gunn and Sylvester Graham had merged, by midcentury, with explicitly feminist goals.⁴ The shift in emphasis from an amorphous suspicion of physicians toward popular health as a primary form of sex education...