Title page from The Physician's Answer.
This slim volume, called The Physician’s Answer, was originally published in 1913 by the International Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association. The subtitle adds a little more information: Medical Authority and Prevailing Misconceptions about Sex.
It looks like — and might have been sold as — a Q and A-style manual of sex education, something like a far fore-runner of Our Bodies, Ourselves or a similar modern publication. In fact, it’s more like a moral treatise on the necessity of physical continence and self-restraint. While both genders are mentioned, Dr. M.J. Exner, author of the small volume, spends most of his 50-something pages talking about young men.
Dr. Exner spends most of his time exhorting young men, in terms that have a distinct tinge of muscular Christianity, to keep themselves clean and pure with married life in mind:
There is but one normal sex life for the young man–normal in relation to his own highest interests and to his social responsibilities–and that is the life in which his sex problem is left wholly to the care of nature, in which his sex impulses are controlled and transmuted into finer stuff by resolute will and high ideals of life as a whole. (5)
While the bulk of the text is devoted to young men — an exact age range is not specified, but it seems fairly clear from context that Dr. Exner has in mind adolescents and young men; anyone married is, obviously, beyond his purview in this case! — there is some commentary on women:
Womanhood outside of marriage does not demand any concessions from society regarding the sex life. Woman expects to control her sex impulses and does control them and every self-respecting man expects and demands that she do so. (18)
The text reflects a real concern with, in essence, what young men might be doing with their time when not at school or work. Anyone looking for day-to-day helpful advice, though, should probably look elsewhere; Dr. Exner has a high philosophical tone and manages to avoid any kind of detail that might have been described as salacious or even specific.
The assumptions about the sex lives of women, too, are fascinating material for historians of gender and women’s studies; the fact that women are so little mentioned in a volume which presumes heterosexuality is interesting in and of itself! The possibilities for study in this volume are widely varied: not only women’s studies historians but also historians interested in youth, medicine, and community organizations would find something here to interest them.
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