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the visitors, but the ladies faces were covered, all going incog.” Famous customers included John Wilkes, the rabble-rousing former lord mayor of London, and also tabloid-courting MP Charles James Fox. The Prince of Wales enjoyed its “superior ecstasy” as well, probably with his mistress, the actress Mary Robinson (who never guessed that the Goddess dancing around her bed had recently been one of her dressers at Drury Lane). Following behind Fox and the rebellious prince trailed the fashionable Whig set, the main political opposition who grouped around the heir to the throne. Graham ensured their attention by criticizing the Tory government and the war with America. The Bed, he declared, would create “Beings rational, and far stronger and more beautiful” than the present "puny" race that "crawl and fret, and politely play at cutting one another's throats for nothing at all."

The daily work of a Goddess began with menial domestic tasks: dusting and cleaning the Temple, running errands, and even slopping out the basement (all the houses in the Adelphi flooded when the Thames overflowed). Throughout the day, patients arrived to receive the curing vibrations of the magnetic Celestial Throne, electric shocks in milk baths, or friction rubs and pulses of electric current. By half past four, the patients had returned home and the Goddesses began dressing for the evening's work in white dresses and pink sashes.

The heavy doors creaked open at five. For two guineas, London's socialites secured seats while "harmonious sounds… breathed forth from the altar of the great electrical temple." At seven, an explosion of fireworks stunned the audience into silence and Graham emerged from a trapdoor in the floor, swathed in satin and encircled by his parading Goddesses, who wore, as one visitor noted, "no more clothing than Venus when she rose from the sea." He then delivered his "libidinous lecture" on the "celestial brilliancy of that universal resplendent and tremendous fire" in his medicines and bizarre apparatus and their power to cure sexual ills and general debility. Quacks at the humblest fair put on a show, but none had ever fused the theatrical with the "medical" with such verve. Bursting with self-promotion, sexual titillation, and semi-mystic promise, Graham held his audience spellbound. All the while, the Goddesses sang ethereal airs while dancing and posing to show off their radiant health or demonstrate the exercises he recommended. Candles blazed, fireworks exploded, electricity bubbled, and the more louche guests lit pipes—surprisingly, none of the hyped-up doctor's performances ever sparked a serious fire.

Graham promised to tell the secrets of "rendering permanent the Joys of the Marriage Bed; of preserving and heightening personal Beauty and Loveliness" and how to maintain the "deep—full—LONG toned juvenile virility" that "ensures female admiration." Although his argument that pleasurable sexual activity was important to a marriage was revolutionary in an age when men married wives to breed children and maintain their home, and kept mistresses for sex, the lectures revealed more about male ideas of female sexuality than conjugal equality. In a torrent of suggestive rhetoric, verbal pyrotechnics, and explicit description, he trumpeted the "balmy—spirituous—vivifying" properties of the male emission. "Without a full and genial tide of this rich, vivifying luminous principle," he claimed, "continually circulating in every part," no "man or woman can enjoy health.” Graham successfully exploited widespread ignorance about sex, fears of infertility, and fashionable obsessions with electricity, recently discovered and barely understood. Preposterous as his breathless panegyrics were, they were the nearest most had to sex education. At the close of the show, the audience received electric shocks by means of conductors hidden under their cushions. As a finale, a spirit apparently emerged from under the floor and handed the doctor a bottle of Electrical Aether. Then the windows fell dark, the room was suddenly illuminated, and