Bernard Simon Talmey

Born in 1862, Bernard Simon Talmey was a physician who earned his medical degree at the University of Munich in 1892 and later practiced in New York. Records from the New York Academy of Medicine note that he lived at 155 West 118th Street in New York, was elected a Fellow in 1906, and died on June 30, 1926.

Talmey wrote a number of books that brought medical and social questions about sex to a wider readership. Surviving bibliographic records list works including Woman (1908), Genesis (1910), Neurasthenia sexualis (1912), and Love (1919). In the preface to Love, he directly connected that later book to his earlier study Woman, showing how he developed a continuing series of works on sexual feeling, morality, and education.

Today he is mainly remembered as a doctor-author whose books tackled subjects many of his contemporaries treated cautiously or avoided altogether. Some of his ideas are very much of their era, but his writing still offers a revealing look at how medicine, morality, and public discussion of sexuality met in the early 1900s.