Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique is a famous popular scientific treatise and self-help book published in London in 1926 by Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, retired director of the Gynecological Clinic in Haarlem, and "one of the major writers on human sexuality during the early twentieth century" (Frayser & Whitby, p. 300). It was the best-known work on its subject for several decades, and was reprinted 46 times in the original edition. After World-War Two, it sold over a half-million copies. A revised edition was published in 1965. and a subsequent one in 2000 (Melody & Pearson, p. 96).
It proclaimed the "critical goal of marriage consists of sexual pleasure shared by husband and wife" (Melody and Person, p. 93). A 2000 edition of the book described itself as concentrating "on the cultivation of the technique of eroticism as an art in marriage."
Frederica Mathewes-Green, in the National Review, described it as
the best-selling sex manual of all time. Over half a million copies were sold in the United States alone, and it enjoyed equal success in Europe. ...This is not a prude's book. Young couples who grab a used copy off the Internet may have even as much fun with it as their great-grandparents did.The first printing had an insert: "The sale of this book is strictly limited to members of the medical profession, Psychoanalysts, Scholars, and to such adults as may have a definite position in the field of Physiological, Psychological, or Social Research." It was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1931.
Famous quotes containing the words ideal, physiology and/or technique:
““The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“The world moves, but we seem to move with it. When I studied physiology before ... there were two hundred and eight bones in the body. Now there are two hundred and thirty- eight.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)