The Physiology of Love: Desire, Beauty, and the Hidden Laws of Human Attraction

What is love when it is no longer treated as a dream, a moral lesson, or a romantic illusion, but as one of the deepest forces of the human body?In The Physiology of Love, Italian physician and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza examines love as desire, attraction, pleasure, beauty, jealousy, imagination, and sexual life. Written with the curiosity of a scientist and the intensity of a man of letters, this forgotten nineteenth-century classic explores the hidden laws of passion and the mysterious bond between body, mind, and emotion.
Mantegazza does not reduce love to sentiment. He studies it as a physical, psychological, and human power: a force that shapes happiness, suffering, vanity, marriage, seduction, sensuality, and the search for beauty. His pages belong to the early history of sexology, but they also speak to anyone interested in the timeless questions of desire and human nature. Bold, elegant, sometimes provocative, and unmistakably of its age, The Physiology of Love is a rare classic for readers interested in:love and desiresexuality and the bodythe psychology of attractionbeauty, pleasure, and seductionclassic sexology and the history of medicinethe hidden forces that govern human relationshipsThis new English edition presents Mantegazza's remarkable work for modern adult readers.
It is a historical and literary text on love, desire, and sexual life; it is not pornography and contains no explicit pornographic material.