The Rise and Fall of the Penis By Mels van Driel - 2

What seems to have happened here is that a clever Dutch publisher persuaded Dr Van Driel that a basic guide to genital problems could be turned into a best-seller if it were padded out with an assortment of historical did-you-knows and biological fancy-thats. And of course the publisher was on to something. Who, for example, would stop reading halfway through the following: 'The iguana’s sex organ is so shaped that it appears to have two penises. A similar abnormal shape was once diagnosed in a 22-year-old Portuguese gipsy. According to the doctors both penises functioned properly and once he had climaxed with one he immediately continued with the other’?

Where the medical details are concerned, we can assume that Dr Van Driel knows what he is talking about. Various anatomical details are deftly explained, with the aid of helpful diagrams. (There are also illustrations of a kind that you would normally expect to see only in a medical textbook – black-and-white photos of penile malformations, which caused me, while reading this book on a crowded train, to perform some rather sudden page-turns.)

But one has to wonder how reliable he is on anything else. It’s not that I suspect him of making things up when he cites an eminent Dutch sexologist called Professor Slob. The problem, rather, is his tendency to cite other people who have made things up, or got things wrong. No serious medieval historian believes that the Albigensians 'sprinkled the bread used for Holy Communion with human sperm’ – a claim for which Van Driel cites, as his authority, the Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis.

As for his statement that a female Pope was elected in 855, and that thereafter the papal election procedure involved putting the candidate on a chair with a hole in it and feeling his testicles, whereupon the assembled cardinals sang 'Habet ova noster papa’ ('our Pope has balls’); well, perhaps it goes down well in Groningen, where the local Calvinists might believe such things. But the legend of Pope Joan was actually demolished by a Calvinist scholar, David Blondel, more than 350 years ago.

On some of his topics there are major works of thought-provoking modern scholarship, which any serious researcher should have read: Leo Steinberg on The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art, for example, or Walter Stephens’s marvellous analysis of the Renaissance claims about having sex with the devil. But Van Driel has passed them by.

Sometimes the information Van Driel gives us would be of doubtful value, even if it were true: 'It is said that Rasputin’s sizeable testicles and penis are preserved in a specially made velvet box’, for instance.

Sometimes he seems to miss the point, as when he speculates that Asian men think of powdered-rhinoceros horn as an aphrodisiac because 'the act of mating in rhinoceroses takes almost an hour and involves multiple ejaculations’. (Chinese peasants have surely not seen David Attenborough films about rhinoceroses, but they can perform a simple association of ideas when they think of a large horn.)

Sometimes, on the other hand, the tidbits of information he has assembled are really rather wonderful. I enjoyed learning, for example, that 'the genitalia of the kamikaze drone of the honey bee are decorated with yellowish protuberances and all kinds of fringes and hairs; at orgasm they explode within the queen like a spring and form a natural chastity belt, which bars access to other suitors, even though the mating drone itself drops dead’. But what relevance that may have to Dr Van Driel’s advice on when or whether I should have a vasectomy is, mercifully, hard to imagine.