Male Sexual Dysfunction Impotence and Suing for Sex in Eighteenth-Century England Barbara Chubak OBJECTIVES To explore the individual and social experiences and meanings of impotence in 18th-century England. METHODS Close reading and period contextualization of various primary source records about impotence, including legal documents from lawsuits for nullity of marriage by reason of impotence, best- selling medical texts, and cheap pornographic pamphlets was done. RESULTS Contemporary, humoral and mechanical medicine and physiology characterized impotence by various etiologies and patient presentations. This left room for laymen, and especially women, to diagnose and interpret the condition according to their own devices. A matter of public, as well as private, concern, impotence carried with it the meanings of failed masculinity, neglected civic responsibility, foreignness, and Catholicism. CONCLUSIONS Impotence in 18th-century England served as a catch-all diagnosis for sexual dysfunction and a vehicle through which to address anxieties about the stability of patriarchal power, female deceit, religion, and politics. Today, medicine, physiology, and the disease itself are very different, but the individual and social meanings of impotence remain influential and worthy of consideration. UROLOGY 71: 480 – 484, 2008. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. I n 1730, Catherine Elizabeth Weld sued her husband Edward Weld for nullity of marriage by reason of his impotence and consequent failure to consummate their nuptials. The trial took place in London’s Court of Arches, the ultimate arbiter of church law within the province of Canterbury, and the records from this and other trials that occurred there have survived to this day. 1 This report has focused on Weld v. Weld, not because it was unusual, but because it is the best documented of the 32 impotence trials in the Arches Court during the 18th century. Suits for nullity of marriage were uncommon, in part because of their extraordinary expense, both financial and social. The Church considered matrimony a mat- ter of the utmost seriousness; thus, the decision to nullify a marriage took many months and hundreds of pounds in legal fees. The lengthy trials were notorious for breeding gossip, and the risk of a smear campaign against the prosecuting party was sufficiently serious that it was explicitly forbidden by law. Wives who exposed their husbands’ sexual dysfunction in court risked being blamed and abandoned by their friends and neighbors. 2 Blame was laid on the prosecuting wife not because of any inadequacy on her part, but because her lawsuit undermined the entire social order. Eigh- teenth century English society was patriarchal, with its basic unit the household headed by a husband and father, whose relationship to his dependants was anal- ogous to that of the king to his subjects. Every patri- arch, from the king to the poorest householder, bore enormous responsibility, for which he was considered naturally suited by his sex. According to the humoral model with which people understood their bodies, gender differences were constitutionally determined, with a man’s heat and strength rendering him naturally dominant over the cooler, weaker woman. Because male heat, strength, and courage were thought to be produced by the male genitalia, sexual and social ca- pacities were inextricably intertwined, and male sexual activity, especially heterosexual, penetrative inter- course, played an important part in the establishment of masculine gender identity and the exercise of patri- archal power. An impotent husband not only lost his manhood, but also exposed the potential weakness of every other patriarch, putting their collective author- ity in jeopardy. 3 I have used the example of Weld v. Weld to explore what historian Adrian Wilson has termed the “disease- concept,” the experience and meaning of impotence in 18th-century England. 4 By considering the process of diagnosis, referral, and treatment, as well as the legal, social, and political ramifications of that process, we will better understand the complex confluence of factors that characterized male sexual dysfunction. The research for this article was supported in part by the Lester Persky Fund for Student Research in Urology, Johns Hopkins Medicine From the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland Reprint requests: Barbara Chubak, M.A., 719 Park Avenue, No. 3, Baltimore, MD 21201. E-mail: barbara@jhmi.edu Submitted: August 23, 2007, accepted (with revisions): October 26, 2007 480 © 2008 Elsevier Inc. 0090-4295/08/$34.00 All Rights Reserved doi:10.1016/j.urology.2007.10.058