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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Bedside Manner

Bedside Manner

This is an age of experts. People like to feel secure in the knowledge that someone somewhere has the answers they cannot find to their oldest, most agonising problems. And since a large and salty part of the sea of human misery flows from the misconceptions or mishandling of sexual relationships, we look to the ‘informed’ physicians to tell us what to think and do about it. In these two books two well-intentioned doctors write authoritatively about problems of sexual growth and problems of homosexuality.

‘The ordinary normal man,’ writes Dr Matthews, ‘falls in love with a girl and marries her. They desire each other passionately, and they give expression to this desire by love-making . . . without haste, risk or guilt, as often as they both desire it. From this love-making spring children who regard them as the greatest people in the world . . .’.

Dr Chessner, as suits his grave and difficult theme, has a more truly ‘scientific’ approach – ‘It cannot be doubted that the late awakening of sex in human beings serves nature’s designs. Man is unique among other animals inpage 405 experiencing an interval of sexual quiescence. We do not find anything like this even among the higher apes and Freud believed that the Latent Period might be responsible for man’s superiority in the scale of evolution . . .’.

It may be discourteous to express doubt concerning the effect of these homilies. But have not Dr Matthews’s imaginary idyllic pair, described in all-but-identical language by a thousand medical sentimentalists, ruined the equilibrium of a million suggestible housewives whose husbands (as husbands do) prefer the pub to wives who read Dr Matthews? And has not the siren song of Dr Chesser, interspersed with case histories, lulling the ear with news of ‘Nature’s design’, brought many fools to solemn acquiescence that people can, must, and do behave like monkeys? It may be discourteous and yet a bitter truth.

1960 (211)