In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a doctor in Ashfield, Massachusetts, published a short book with a long title: Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician. Knowlton, who was thirty-one, was a “freethinker” and, by the standards of the Berkshires, an unusually adventurous soul. While attending the New Hampshire Medical Institute (now Dartmouth Medical School), he was too poor to pay for a dissecting class and so had liberated a corpse from a cemetery.
