Though you might not suspect it from its misleadingly dry title, Fruits of Philosophy caused quite a stir in its day. Rather than being an august treatise on the works of Aristotle and Socrates, this slim volume produced by a renegade Massachusetts physician in the early 1830s compiled the most up-to-date information then known about sex, conception, and birth control. The author was later convicted of indecency and sentenced to a term of hard labor.
