Illustration from Part IV of Foote’s “Plain Home Talk.”
Edward B. Foote’s Plain home talk about the human system, published in 1870, is one of the large number of nineteenth century home advice manuals. Such manuals usually covered a wide variety of topics, potentially including not only medical advice, but also notes on home brewing, child-rearing, animal husbandry, and cooking.
Plain home talk doesn’t include any of these topics, but does not focus on disease and curatives either. Foote has an axe to grind on the subject of sexual education and modern family structure.
Foote’s entry into the genre has an incredibly detailed table of contents that starts off predictably enough with “Disease–Its [sic] Causes, Prevention, and Cure” with subsections on the causes of disease, the problems in contaminated food, and “the bad habits of children and youth.” Foote then goes on to the Prevention of Disease and Common Sense Remedies. In Part III of the book, he branches out into what he calls “plain talk,” what might be called now sex ed or family planning: The Sexual Organs, History of Marriage, and the Demerits of Monogamy. Part IV details his suggestions for the improvement of marriage, starting with a long disquisition on the importance of adaptation (the couple to each other) in marriage.
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