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Dr. William H. Masters, half the Masters and Johnson sex research team who startled but also informed the world with their controversial studies and books over four decades, has died. He was 85.
Masters, who for 22 years was married to his research partner, psychologist Virginia Johnson, died Friday in Tucson, Ariz., of complications of Parkinson's disease.
The groundbreaking researcher had energetically continued his sex education campaign until shortly before his retirement in 1994, when he closed his St. Louis-based Masters and Johnson Institute and moved to Tucson.
Only a few months before then, he had launched a telephone hotline to answer questions about sex, telling a meeting of the American Psychological Assn. in Toronto somewhat sadly that, despite his life's work, information on sexual function was still largely confined to textbooks and therapists' offices.
"So much of sexual disorders and dysfunction is based on ignorance and lack of education," he said. "If I can't get information to the public through professionals, I'll get it to the public myself."
Masters knew whereof he spoke--not only from his research but from the massive reaction to his reports, beginning with that cataclysmic first book, "Human Sexual Response."
Nobody, least of all the authors, expected the impact that first tome would make when it landed in bookstores on April 18, 1966. The 365-page textbook, based on Masters' and Johnson's 11-year study of 382 women aged 18 to 78 and 312 men aged 21 to 89, was written for physicians and behavioral scientists.
But the public snapped it up: The first...