This hugely enjoyable jaunt through medical history unearths some odd characters, including: The Essex man who kept getting pregnant; The physician who gave syphilis its name by writing a poem about it; The future Lady Hamilton training to be a courtesan by giving lectures on healthy living; We also meet nineteenth and twentieth century moralising doctors whose instinctive response to people having fun was to look for the dangers - they condemned bicycling because it could stimulate the 'sexual system' of 'women of a certain temperament'; they protected young men from the dread disease of masturbation by blistering their penises with iodine. With this collection of true tales, some sad, some anger-provoking, some hilarious, Michael O'Donnell offers an inside view of the bizarre yet often endearing world in which doctors and their patients try their best to survive.