The ins and outs of sexual imaging.

Golf and sex are the only two things you don't have to be good at to enjoy. W hat happens inside the human body during sexual intercourse has fascinated artists, scientists, and the public since the start of humanity. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) drew the internal anatomy of a couple engaged in intercourse in " The Cop-ulation " and suggested that connections between the penis, the distal spinal cord, and the brain existed. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the act of sex was not scientifically studied. The term " sexology " was first used in Victorian times to describe the relationship between men and women. 1 The idea of " sexual science " originated in Germany and Italy, and the term " sexual medicine " was not established until the 1970s. In the United States, the first physician who worked full-time in " diseases " of a sexual nature was Harry Benjamin, who studied mostly trans-sexualism. Perhaps one of the most common names associated with sexual medicine is Alfred Kinsey, who collected the sexual clinical histories of more than 18,000 patients (a story entertainingly told by T.C. Boyle in his novel The Inner Circle, Viking Adult, 2003). Kinsey was the first to quantitate a few aspects of sexual behavior. His legacy lives on at the Kinsey Institute (http://www. kinseyinstitute.org) at Indiana University in Bloomington. A few years after the apparition of the " Kinsey Report, " 2 Masters and Johnson began their studies of sexuality, all of which culminated with the creation of the International Society for Sexual Medicine, which now publishes the Journal of Sexual Medicine (Impact Factor: 3.55). Today, sexual medicine is a serious and mature specialty that incorporates physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and even neuroradiologists. Sex has 2 goals: foremost reproduction and then pleasure. The main brain region controlling pleasure and thus orgasm is the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus. In animals, stimulation of this region elicits pleasurable sexual responses via sympathetic (by way of the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus) and parasympathetic mechanisms. 1 Axons from this region connect with the nucleus paragingantocellularis in the ventrolateral me-dulla, and axons from the latter extend down to the tip of the spinal cord (here it is curious to note that during the Renaissance, semen was thought to come down from the brain traveling by way of a canal in the spine and following a path that somewhat matches …