亚历克斯·康福特

埃里克斯·康富特（英语：Alex Comfort，1920年2月10日—2000年3月26日）是一位英国科学家，专攻老人学和贝类学，还是一位性解放主义者和良心拒服兵役者，主要作品有《衰老的生物学》（Ageing – the Biology of Senescence）、《性的欢愉》（The Joy of Sex）等。

Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician, writer and activist, known best for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex (1972). He was a poet and author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, geriatrician, sexologist, political theorist and commentator, anarchist, and pacifist.

Early life and education

Comfort was born in Palmers Green, North London, and raised in Barnet, Hertfordshire, then a London suburb. His parents were Alexander Charles Comfort, an administrator in education at the London County Council, and Daisy Elizabeth (Fenner) Comfort, a former teacher, who taught her son French and some Latin by the time he began school. He was educated at Highgate School in London. While he was a student there he tried to develop an improved compound of gunpowder. During his experiments he inadvertently blew up his left hand, of which only the thumb remained. Later he claimed that his left hand proved "very useful for performing uterine inversions".

Comfort had a passion for molluscs, developed on family holidays in Hartland, on the Devon coast, and he joined the Conchological Society of Great Britain & Ireland when he was eighteen years old. He made many contributions to the literature.

He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge and studied medicine, qualifying in 1944 with the conjoint diplomas of Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LRCP) London, Member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS) England, and Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery or MB BChir.

Life and work

Comfort served as a house physician at the London Hospital and later became a lecturer in physiology at the London Hospital Medical College. During 1945 he obtained the Conjoint Board's Diploma in Child Health. He progressed to a PhD in 1949 for a dissertation titled "The Acid-Soluble Pigments of Molluscan Shells (with Special Reference to Porphyrins)" from the University of London, and a DSc in the field of gerontology, also from the University of London, in 1962.

A pacifist, Comfort considered himself "an aggressive anti-militarist", and he believed that pacifism rested "solely upon the historical theory of anarchism". During World War Two, Comfort wrote a letter to the Tribune (2 April 1943) denouncing the Allied bombing of civilians:

The bombardment of Europe is not the work of soldiers nor of responsible statesmen. It is the work of bloodthirsty fools. ... Night after night those Europeans who risk their liberty to listen can hear the emetic threatenings and boastings of bloody-minded and reactionary civilians. They contrast the alacrity and satisfaction which attend each contemptible operation with the subterfuge and sloth which we have displayed in such tasks of constructive policy as the admission to sanctuary of the Jewish refugees.

In a letter to Horizon in 1942 Comfort claimed that a Nazi victory over the United Kingdom would lead to a literary renaissance, for which he was fiercely criticised by George Orwell in the Partisan Review. Comfort was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a conscientious objector in World War II. In 1951 Comfort was a signatory of the Authors' World Peace Appeal, but later resigned from its committee, claiming the AWPA had become dominated by Soviet sympathisers. Later in the decade he actively endorsed both the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, 1957, and the Committee of 100, 1960. Comfort was imprisoned for a month, with Bertrand Russell and other leading members of the Committee of 100, for refusing to be bound not to continue organising the Parliament Square/Trafalgar Square protest of 17 September 1961. In 1964 he joined Russell's Who Killed Kennedy? Committee.