required to tell about ever so many things concerning which they were
totally ignorant; and to tell about ever so many things, by word of
mouth, to each individual patient, _takes time_--ever so much time, if
the work is well done, and it had better not be done at all if it is
not well done. So I really was forced to write out what I wanted to
teach these patients of mine.

And let me say further that I was compelled to write these things out
for my people as I have written them, because, in all the range of
literature on this vital subject, I knew of nothing which would tell
them just what it seemed to me they ought to be told, and what they
ought to know.

And so it was that I wrote the manuscript which is now printed in the
following pages. I did not write it at first just as it now stands,
because experience showed me, from time to time, where my first
efforts could be modified and improved. So what is here presented is
the result of many practical demonstrations of the real working value
of what the manuscript contains.

My method of using the copy has been something as follows: As I have
already suggested, what I have written has been prepared for the sole
and express purpose of helping husbands and wives to live sane and
wholesome sex-lives--to give them the requisite knowledge for so
doing; knowledge of themselves and of each other as sexual beings; the
correct ideas regarding such right manner of living; to disabuse their
minds of wrong sex-teaching, or no teaching at all, of ignorance,
or prudery, or carelessness, or lust--in a word, to get to them the
things that all sane married people ought to know, and to help them to
practice these things, to the best of their several abilities.