Famed Loyola sex therapist Domeena Renshaw, wrote ‘Seven Weeks to Better Sex,’ dead at 90

When Dr. Domeena Renshaw founded the first sex therapy clinic in the Chicago area nearly half a century ago, “Little was known about sexual difficulties,” she told an interviewer at the time of her retirement in 2009. “Today, you cannot go more than a few minutes without seeing an erectile dysfunction commercial on television.”

Dr. Renshaw, who wrote the 1995 book “Seven Weeks to Better Sex,” estimated she helped treat more than 3,000 married couples whose problems stemmed from overwork, lack of sleep, physical ailments or ignorance about human anatomy and sexual function.

One couple she counseled had an unconsummated marriage for 28 years.

“Ignorance,” she said, “is not bliss when it comes to sexuality.”

Over her 40-year-career at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, she witnessed the advent of Viagra and Internet affairs as well as increased independence and choices for women, who she said were just as likely as men to be unfaithful.

The Loyola Sex Therapy Clinic, which she started in 1972, was “really a love clinic,” she once told the Sun-Times.

Dr. Renshaw, a longtime resident of Lombard, died July 8 at her home. She was 90.

Sun Times file

“Domeena was an internationally renowned scholar, both the physiologic and emotional aspects of marriage and sexuality,” said Dr. Robert C. Flanigan, a Loyola urology professor. “She just had that amazingly bubbly personality that people took to. She did a tremendous amount of good and helped so many people.”

“Domeena Renshaw is a historical figure for Loyola. Before her, there were only [sex researchers] Masters and Johnson who talked on sexual wellness and human sexuality,” said Dr. Murali Rao, who chairs Loyola’s psychiatry department. “There are so many people around the world trained by Domeena — physicians, social workers, psychologists, mental health care providers.”

A sheltered upbringing in Kimberley, South Africa, didn’t foreshadow her psychiatric specialty, not to mention her plainspoken guest spots on national talk shows. A 1997 article in Psychiatric Times described her education at Convent High School, “a small all-girls facility housed in Cecil Rhodes’ 1880 mansion.”

“The only science class offered was botany, so we were prepared for marriage rather than medical school while the good nuns prayed we would enter as novitiates,” she said in the interview.

She became interested in the mind-body connection at 15 after she came upon the victim of a car accident and comforted him. He’d been thrashing around, thinking his leg was broken, she wrote in her book. She could see the injury wasn’t serious. After calming him, “The man sat up, stood and then walked away,” she said.

“There on the open veld of the plains of Africa, not knowing at all what it meant, I was unable to articulate how I had by common sense and reassurance talked a frightened 6-foot male out of a hysterical somatic reaction,” she told Psychiatric Times. “I had not heard the word psychiatry. I knew there were ‘brain doctors’; so therefore I had to go to medical school.”

It wasn’t easy to break away from her family, she said in the article. “For me, an only daughter, to emancipate from a super-conservative controlling mother and a quietly supportive father was difficult. Threats of disinheritance, never being spoken to again, of being responsible for strokes and deaths prepared me to be a calm, effective therapist.”

In the mid-1950s, she studied at the University of Cape Town Medical School, then did a residency at Boston Children’s Hospital. In the United States, she met her future husband, economist Robert Renshaw. He died in 2010.

“He wrote to me every day while I was working in a missionary hospital in South Africa,” she said in her book. There, she treated people with parasitic diseases, snakebites and malnutrition. “Three years later, he came to Africa to marry me.”

In 1968, after completing her psychiatry residency, she landed a job at Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine. She said her career choice was influenced by her office location — between the departments of urology and gynecology.

“Very simply, it was geography,” she told the Sun-Times.

“The gynecology department began sending me women who couldn’t have an orgasm and the urology department started referring men who couldn’t get an erection,” she wrote in her book.

Dr. Renshaw studied the work of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson and utilized sex education and counseling. The clinic instructed couples on making time for each other and several weeks of home exercises that progressed from caressing to intercourse.

“This clinic never has spent a dollar on advertising,” she told the Sun-Times in 1999, “and we have a waiting list of couples” — sometimes eight months long.

Dr. Renshaw is survived by her brothers Errol and Gregory Joseph of South Africa. A memorial Mass has been held.