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, bestselling 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.