So long in coming

摘要

When William Masters was an associate professor of obstetrics at Washington University in the early 1950s, he wanted to see the library's one textbook on human sexual physiology. No dice. The book was regarded as possibly pornographic, and thus reserved for full professors. Actually, he would not have learnt much even if the librarians had been persuaded to slip him the volume in a brown paper bag. In those days people's sex organs were pretty much terra incognita, as a new biography of Masters and his research partner, Virginia Johnson, vividly explains.