In spring of 1846 a large audience gathered to hear what promised to be a hotly contested lecture. Speakers on lyceum circuit that year had tackled national controversies such as antislavery movement and American war against Mexico. In Philadelphia Dr. Frederick Hollicks anatomy lessons had stirred equally passionate reactions. Hollick had promised to reveal of and now he stood poised next to a naked woman. Unlike women in his audience she was made of papier-mâche-this was the large anatomical that these respectable men and women of Philadelphia had come together and paid to see. The completeness and accuracy of model Hollick promised astonishing...so true is whole to nature that many have even fainted away at a first view from impression that they were viewing a real body! While spoke to a hushed crowd about pleasures of the generative act and marvels of pregnancy he dissected model before their eyes. The audiences gaze fastened upon body as they listened to lecture on sexual function as well as anatomy. Peeling back layers of papier-mache‚ woman he also professed to reveal hidden information about sex. In fact Hollick argued that frequent sexual pleasure constituted a physiological necessity for all postpubescent human beings regardless of gender or marital status a stance that he insisted was medical but that his enemies deemed obscene. Published same year The Origin of Life collected Hollicks first courses of popular lectures and disseminated their messages about sex to still wider audiences. But books graphic descriptions of genital anatomy (hetero) sexual ecstasy and autoeroticism also caught unfavorable attention of Philadelphias district attorney. The obscenity trial that ensued targeted both book and lectures placing Hollick and his audiences at center of several interconnecting boundary disputes. Who could speak about medicine health and body? Should sex be discussed at all in a public forum? What criteria should be used to distinguish between a medical lecture on sexual health and an obscene speech? Did title doctor empower a speaker to advocate for a liberalization of contemporary sexual mores? This essay will use trials of Frederick Hollick as entry point to explore sexual politics inherent in popular health movement which dominated discussions of American medicine for first half of nineteenth century? Usually understood primarily as a form of widespread resistance to medical professionalization movement also developed into first wave of public sex education in America. Therefore popular health can properly be understood as a social movement that brought sexuality into public sphere often appropriating a medical idiom to challenge conservative sex and gender arrangements. The most daring lecturers of 1840s and 1850s critiqued institution of marriage from health reform podium. (excerpt)