Alexander Comfort (February 10, 1920 - March 26, 2000) was a British scientist and physician best known for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex (1972). He is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, as well as an expert gerontologist, anarchist, pacifist, and conscience.
Video Alex Comfort
Early life and education
Convenience educated at Highgate School in London. As a student there, he tried to develop a potion of superior gunpowder. During his experiment he accidentally explodes his left hand, which is just the thumb left. (Later, he claimed that his left hand proved "very useful for inversion of the uterus.") This story is used as evidence of his single mind.
He was matriculated at Trinity College of Trinity College for medical studies, qualifying for 1944 with both the Conjoint diploma from Licentiate from Royal College of Physicians (LRCP) London, a Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS) Member of England and Cambridge Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery or MB BChir level. Overall, he earned six titles.
Comfort has a passion for molluscs and joins the Conchological Society of Great Britain & amp; Ireland when he was eighteen years old and contributed much to the literature.
Maps Alex Comfort
Live and work
Comfort served as the House Doctor for London Hospital and later became a lecturer in physiology at London Hospital Medical College. During 1945 he obtained a Conjoint Board Diploma in Children's Health, and continued to a PhD during 1950 and DSc University College, London during 1963.
A pacifist, Comfort considers himself "an aggressive anti-militarist," and he believes that pacifism rests "solely on the historical theory of anarchism." During the Second World War, Comfort wrote a letter to the Tribune magazine (2 April 1943) which denounced the Allied bombing of civilians:
The bombardment of Europe is not the work of a responsible army or statesman. This is the work of a blood-thirsty fool.... Night after night the Europeans who risk their freedom to listen can hear intense threats and bloody and reactionary bloody civilians. They compare the speed and satisfaction that every humble operation presents with the tricks and laziness we have displayed in constructive policy duties such as recognition to the Jewish refuge of the Jewish refugees.
He is an active member of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a repellent of conscience in World War II. In 1951, Convenience was the signatory of the World Peaceful Writers Appeal, but later resigned from the committee, claiming the AWPA had been dominated by Soviet sympathizers. Later in the decade he actively supported the Direct Action Committee against the Nuclear War, 1957, and Committee 100, 1960. Comfort was incarcerated for a month, with Bertrand Russell and other prominent members of the Committee 100, refusing to become bound to not continue organizing the Square protests Square/Trafalgar Square September 17, 1961.
Among Comfort's publications of anarchism are Peace and Incompetence (1946), one of the many pamphlets he wrote for the Peace News and the PPU, and Authority and Delinquency at Modern Country (1950). He exchanged public correspondence with George Orwell defending pacifism in an open letter/poem, "Letter to the American Visitor", under the pseudonym "Obadiah Hornbrooke".
The Comfort Book The Joy of Sex (1972) makes it famous worldwide and $ 3 million. But she does not like being known as "Dr. Sex" and has other works given so little attention.
Convenience devoted most of the 1950s and 1960s studied the biology of aging (biogerontology) and popularized the subject. He can be called an early biomedical gerontologist (extensionist of life) on the basis of his opinion that science can extend human life. During 1969 he suggested that life expectancy (not just maximum life span) could be extended to 120 years in the next 20 years. Although Comfort believes that aging can be delayed, he does not believe that aging can be eliminated, and he does not write about rejuvenation.
One of the final letters from Comfort was for The Guardian during 1989, protesting the government's introduction of the poll tax by Thatcher.
Personal life
The Joy of Sex made Comfort known internationally as "Dr. Sex" and soon she and her thirty-year-old wife divorced. A few months later, during 1973, Comfort married his lover (and former best friend) Jane Henderson, with whom he had cheated for more than a decade. (The Illustrations in The Joy of Sex are based on the Polaroid that Comfort and Henderson have taken and give to the publisher.) The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal research institute, offers Comfort employment, and so, during 1973, the couple it moved to Santa Barbara, California, where it is located.
They often visit Sandstone Retreat, a special clothing community in California that supports "open sexuality," or swinging. In the 1981 nonfiction publication on sexuality in America, Your Talent, Gay Talese noted, "Often the naked biologist Dr. Alex Comfort, swinging a cigar, across the space between a vulnerable body and the professional air of a lepidopterist walking through the fields fields while waving a butterfly net ".
Jane Henderson, however, eventually became bored with the community of "open love" and Comfort was involved in a lawsuit with her employer regarding a claimed breach of contract. During 1985, the couple returned to England, where they lived the rest of their lives in Kent. During 1991, Comfort suffered a severe brain hemorrhage, after which his son from his first marriage acted as caregiver and business manager. His second wife, Jane Henderson, died soon after the bleeding. He died on March 26, 2000; he was eighty years old.
Partial bibliography
Comfort, Alexander. 1967. Maker of anxiety: some curious preoccupation of the medical profession. Nelson
References
External links
- AlexComfort.net - full text 'Authority and Delinquency' and 'Me and That: A Note on Religious Biology'
- Alex Comfort biography - with attention to his anarchist politics
- See Alex Comfort Page in Anarchist Encyclopedia
- Obituary guardian
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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