Nineteenth-century british psychiatric Writing about homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: The missing story

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Volumn 63, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 65-102

  Crozier, Ivan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

British psychiatry; Homosexuality; Sexology; Sexual perversions

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HEALTH PERSONNEL ATTITUDE; HISTORY; HOMOSEXUALITY; HUMAN; PERCEPTION; PSYCHIATRY; SEXOLOGY; SEXUAL DEVIATION; UNITED KINGDOM; WRITING;

ATTITUDE OF HEALTH PERSONNEL; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HOMOSEXUALITY; HUMANS; PARAPHILIAS; PERCEPTION; PSYCHIATRY; SEXOLOGY; WRITING;

EID: 39049148476     PISSN: 00225045     EISSN: 14684373     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrm046     Document Type: Article

References (172)

1. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and MacMillan, 1897). I am preparing a new edition of this text for Palgrave MacMillan, forth-coming 2007. Ellis makes this argument by emphasizing that, unlike in his text, there were no British cases that had not been in prison or in the asylum, and for this reason he ignores the other British writings that preceded his own, even though they were often in the Journal of Mental Science, a periodical for which he reviewed regularly.
2. For two examples that failed to uncover a whole field of medical writing on homosexuality, despite valiant attempts, see Ivan Crozier, "The Medical Construction of Homosexuality and its Relation to the Law in Nineteenth-Century England," Med. Hist., 2001, 45, 61-82;
3. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain (London: Quartet Books, 1977), ch. 2 and 5.
4. Regina v. Boulton and others (Park), 9 May 1871, DPP4/6, National Archive, Kew, UK.
5. To qualify this idea, Lesley Hall argues in "'The English Have Hot Water Bottles': The Morganatic Marriage between Sexology and Medicine since William Acton," in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), that sexuality was not a medical topic with a high status. Elsewhere she suggests that the work of sexologists was being done before this "sexological turn" by various other people, such as feminists and members of the social purity movement.
6. See Hall, "Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism, Social. Purity and Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain," Gender & Hist., 2004, 16, 36-56.
7. Pace Hall, in this article I will argue that sexological writing by psychiatrists was alive and well in Britain. Further, in order to argue that such "problematizing of the sexual double standard" has little to do with, what psychiatrists were doing when they wrote about sex, I will suggest that simply being writing about sexuality does not equate to "points of equivalence" between two (or more) very different fields. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1972), 65-66. In order to understand the emergence of sexological writing in Britain, one should keep one's attention, within the field.
8. The emergence of sexology is discussed in Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);
9. Ivan Crozier, "Sexologie et la concepts du normal, 1860-1900," Cahiers du Genre, 2003, 43, 17-37.
10. David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002).
11. As, for example, Thomas Laqueur does with masturbation in Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003).
12. Despite overlooking most pre-1900 British psychiatric writing about homosexuality, Sean Brady recently noted in his well-researched book that "although British alienists had, through reading the [Journal of Mental Science], some awareness of the existence of Continental sexology and inversion theorisation, all resisted developing these ideas into a meaningful scientific discipline in Britain," Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
13. See Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). In particular, it is worth drawing attention to the birth controller, George Drysdale, and his anonymously printed Elements of Social Science London: n.p., 1855 and later editions.
14. See Crazier, "The Medical Construction of Homosexuality."
15. See Crazier, '"All the Appearances were Perfectly Natural': The Anus of the Sodomite in Medical Discourses, 1850-1900," in Body Parts, ed. Christopher Forth, and Ivan Crozier (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 65-84;
16. Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000).
17. For example, Richard Burton, "Terminal Essay," Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, 8 vols. (London: privately printed, 1897), vol, 8.
18. Patrick Geddes and J. A. Thompson, The Evolution of Sex (London: Walter Scott, 1889).
19. John Addington Symonds, A Study in Modern Ethics (n.p. [London?]: privately printed, 1891);
20. Marc-André Raffalovich, "Uranism, Congenital Sexual Inversion: Observations and Recommendation," trans. C. Judson Herrick, J. Comp. Neurol., 1895, 5, 33-65.
21. See Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (London: Penguin, 1995).
22. See Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie, and Nicholas Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), ch. I;
23. M. J. Clarke, "The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder in Late Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatry," in Madhouses, Mad-Doctoring and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era, ed. Andrew Scull (London: Athlone Press, 1981).
24. See Scull, MacKenzie, and Hervey, Masters of Bedlam, Introduction.
25. Such notions derive from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, "The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason," Sociological Forum, 1991, 6, 3-26,
26. and "The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason," Soc. Sd. Info., 1975, 14, 19-47.
27. See Barry Barnes, "Status Groups and Collective Action," Sociol., 1992, 26, 259-70.
28. A number of other works on professionalization and the gaining control of an object of discourse that helped my work here include: Eliot Freidson, "The Theory of Professions: The State of the Art," Dietrich Rueschemeyer, "Professional Autonomy and the Social Control of Expertise," and Paul Atkinson, "The Reproduction of the Professional Community," all in The Sociology of the Professions, ed. Robert Dingwall and Phillip Lewis (London: MacMillan, 1983);
29. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).
30. See Ian Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness (Berkeley: California University Press, 1991);
31. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001).
32. Such strategies of exclusion are typical forms of boundary work in scientific disputes. See Thomas Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), esp. the Introduction.
33. This discussion of the development of a space that provided an opportunity for specific observation, of the patients owes much to Michel Foucault's discussion of the opening of a space for the observation of disease in the clinic, in Birth of the Clinic, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1973). The construction of such space was of such importance to the practitioners of psychiatry that texts were written on how to best manage this space, for instance Charles Mercier's Lunatic Asylums: Their Organisation and Management (London: Charles Griffin and Co., 1894).
34. J. C. Bucknill and D. H. Tuke, "Erotomania," in Manual of Psychological Medicine (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1858), 212-15.
35. See also Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol, Des maladies mentales considérées sous le rapport médicale, hygiénique et médico-legal, 2 vols. (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1838).
36. Moral insanity was a concept developed by J. C. Prichard in the 1830s; see H. F. Augstein, "J. C. Prichard's Concept of Moral. Insanity: A Medical Theory of the Corruption, of Human Nature," Med. Hist., 1996, 40, 311-43. It was still current at the end of the century and will be noted below when the works of George Savage and Charles Mercier are addressed.
37. Joseph Williams, Insanity, Its Causes, Prevention, and Cure; Including Apoplexy, Epilepsy, and Congestion of the Brain, 2nd ed. (London: John Churchill, 1852), 41.
38. Ibid., 72.
39. George Robinson, On Prevention and Treatment of Mental Disorders (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), 130.
40. Forbes Winslow, On Obscure Diseases of the Brain (London: John Churchill, 1860), 187.
41. For more on Winslow, see Scull, MacKenzie, and Hervey, Masters of Bedlam, 301.
42. Ibid., 315-16.
43. Scull, MacKenzie, and Hervey, Masters of Bedlam, 246-47 (see also ch, 8).
44. For more on Maudsley, see Henry Rollin, "What Ever Happened to Henry Maudsley?" in Berrios and Freeman, 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 351-58.
45. Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, 3rd ed. (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 171.
46. See Roger Smith, "The Boundary between Insanity and Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England," in Scull, Madhouses, Mad-Doctoring and Madmen, 363-84.
47. Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, 173.
48. Henry Maudsley, "An Address on Medical Psychology," Br. Med. J., 1872, 2, 163-67, 165.
49. For more on the thorny problem, of degeneration, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
50. Sander Oilman and J. E. Chamberlin, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
51. Ibid., 166.
52. Ibid., 167.
53. W. H. O. Sankey, Lectures on Mental Disease, 2nd ed. (London: H. K. Lewis, 1884), 284. Italics in original.
54. Dr. Macnish, "Adhesiveness," Lancet, 6 August 1836, 2, 633.
55. Anon., "Aberrations of the Sexual Instinct," Med. Times Gaz., 9 February 1867, 142.
56. Ibid. It could have been worse. The author noted, "an aberration of the sexual, instinct more unnatural and detestable still, marriage without the fruits thereof," 143.
57. Ibid., 145.
58. Ibid., 146.
59. Julius Krueg, "Perverted Sexual Impulses," Brain, 1881, 4, 368-76, 370
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 371.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 372.
64. Ibid., 373.
65. Ibid., 373-74.
66. Ibid., 374.
67. Ibid., 375.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 376.
72. For more on Savage, see Munk's Roll, 12 vols. (London: Royal College of Physicians, 1861 - 2004), 4:306-7;
73. Scull, MacKenzie, and Hervey, Masters of Bedlam, 295, n. 161;
74. Stephen Trambley, "All That Summer She Wis Mad": Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: junction Books, 1981);
75. Edward Renvoize, "The Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane, the Medico-Psyhological Association, and their Presidents," in Berrios and Freeman, 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 29-78, esp. 56-57.
76. George Savage, "Case of Sexual Perversion in a Man," J. Ment. Sci., 1884, 30, 390-91, 391.
77. George Savage, "Moral Insanity," J. Ment. Sci., 1881, 27, 147-55, 150. Savage noted that "The chief characteristic of the moral insanity of pubescence is the uncontrolled sexual passion exhibiting itself in self-abuse, unrestrained sexual intercourse, even with near relations, and bestiality of the lowest description," 152.
78. Savage, "Case of Sexual Perversion in a Man," 390.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 391.
81. Dr. Urquhart, "Case of Sexual Perversion," J. Ment. Sci., 1891, 37, 94-96, 94.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., 95.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 96.
87. "Anon., Discussion at the Quarterly Meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, November 13, 1890," J. Ment. Sci., 1891, 37, 200.
88. For more on William Ireland, see Scull, Mackenzie, and Hervey, Masters of Bedlam.
89. Anon., "Discussion at the Medico-Psychological Association,"
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. See Ireland, "German Retrospect," J. Ment. Sci., 1878, 23, 602-11, esp. "Contrary Sexual Feelings," 607-8, discussed below.
93. Anon., "Discussion at the Medico-Psychological. Association," 200.
94. Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 253-54.
95. Anon., "Discussion at the Medico-Psychological Association," 200.
96. Scull, MacKenzie, and Hervey, Masters of Bedlam, 254 and 352, n. 26.
97. Charles Mercier, Sanity and Insanity (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 154.
98. Ibid., 233. Mercier expanded on his treatment of homosexuality in: A Text-Book of Insanity (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902), 96;
99. Criminal Responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 143-47;
100. Crime and Criminals (London: University of London Press, 1918), 187, 198-99;
101. and in Crime and Insanity (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913), 219-20.
102. Mercier, Lunatic Asylums, 209, also 115. Havelock Ellis mentioned sexual perversion amongst criminals, noting diat "[t]o all forms of sexual excitement, natural, and unnatural, criminals of both, sexes resort, often, from, a very early age.
103. The prison, in which the criminal is confined alone, or with persons of the same sex, serves to develop perverted sexual habits to a high degree." Ellis, The Criminal (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 144.
104. Mercier, A Text-Book of Insanity, 96.
105. Ibid., 98-99.
106. Hack Tuke, ed., A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, 2 vols. (London: J & A Churchill, 1892).
107. For more on this work, see W. F. Bynum, "Tuke's Dictionary and Psychiatry at the Turn of the Century," in Berrios and Freeman, 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 163-79.
108. Eugene Mendel, "Diagnosis," in Tuke, Dictionary, 535.
109. Gustave Bouchereau, "Erotic Insanity; or Erotomania," in Tuke, Dictionary, 702. See also his entries on nymphomania and satyriasis.
110. Ibid., 703.
111. Conolly Norman, "Sexual Perversion," in Tuke, Dictionary, 1156.
112. Ibid., 1156-57.
113. Ibid., 1157.
114. Ibid.
115. In particular, Sullivan would write epitomes of the French and German literature for the Journal of Mental Science,
116. including "Epitome of Garnier and Wahl, 'Un nouveau cas de perversions sexuelles,' Gazette des Hôpitals, April 2, 1901,"
117. and "Epitome of 'Sexuelle Perversität und Strafrecht,' Allegemeine österreichenische Gerichts-Zeitung, 1901,"
118. both in J. Ment. Sci., 1901, 47, 823. The first of these discussed a twenty-six year-old male with a fabric fetish with a "strong repulsion to normal coitus;" the second discussed Moritz Benedikt's work, highlighting the latter's attacks on the doctrine of legal irresponsibility of the homosexual offender. Sullivan, as suggested by his opinions about the relationship between masturbation and homosexuality, does not admit irresponsibility, and noted, that "The proper place for the sexual invert who acts on his impulses is the prison."
119. William C. Sullivan, "Notes on a Case of Acute Insanity with Sexual Perversion," J. Ment. Sci., 1893, 39, 225-26, 225.
120. Ibid.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., 226.
124. Ibid.
125. George Savage and Charles Mercier, "Insanity of Conduct," J. Ment. Sci., 1896, 42, 1-17, 2.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid., 6.
128. Ibid.
129. Ibid., 10.
130. Ibid., 14.
131. Ibid.
132. For a discussion of the development and importation of hypnotism into British psychiatry, see R. D. Hinshelwood, "Psychodynamic Psychology before World War I," in Berrios and Freeman, 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 197-205, esp. 199-200.
133. See also Hinshelwood, "The Organization of Psychoanalysis in Britain," Psychoanal. Hist., 1998, 1, 87-102;
134. George Makari, "Towards Defining the Freudian Unconscious: Seduction, Sexology and the Negative of Perversion (1896-1905)," Hist. Psychiatry, 1997, 3, 459-86, esp. 460-62.
135. For attention to hypnosis and the human sciences more generally, see Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
136. Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993);
137. Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1970), 112-20;
138. Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry (New York: Wiley, 1997), 137-40;
139. Sonu Shamdasani, "The Psychoanalytic Body," in Companion to Medicine in the Tiventieth Century, ed. Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 307-22.
140. See Terry Parnissen, "Professional Deviants and the History of Medicine: Medical Mesmerists in Victorian Britain," in On the Margins of Science, ed. Roy Wallis (Keele: Keele University Press, 1979), 103-19;
141. Mary Elizabeth Leighton, '"Hypnosis Redivivus': Ernest Hart, the British Medical Journal,
142. and the Hypnotism Controversy," Victorian Periodicals Rev., 2001, 34, 104-27.
143. See Clarke, "The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder," 278-83.
144. C. Lloyd Tuckey, Psycho-therapeutics (London: Ballière, Tindall, and Cox, 1889), 37.
145. C. Lloyd Tuckey, Psycho-therapeutics, 3rd ed. (London: Balliere, Tindall, and Cox, 1891), 268, case 22. Tuckey noted that "Dr. Von Schrenck-Notzing, of Munich, read before the International Congress notes on a case of this kind, treated, by him with the happiest results."
146. C. Lloyd Tuckey, Treatment by Hypnosis and Suggestion, or, Psycho-therapeutics, 4th ed. (London: Ballière, Tindall, and Cox, 1900), 309, case 22.
147. Dr. H., "Gynomania-A Curious Case of Masturbation," Med. Record, 1881, 19, 336.
148. E. C. Spitzka, "Gynomania," Med. Record, 1881, 19, 359.
149. Although much is written about American sexology, for instance Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999),
150. Harry Oosterhuis, Step-children of Nature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999) gives the best account of the impact of these American discourses on Continental thinking.
151. Anon., review of Westphal's "Die Conträire Sexualempfindung, " in Archive für Psychiatrie, 1869, 2;
152. reported, inj. Ment. Sci., October 1871, 422.
153. Ireland, "German Retrospect," 607.
154. Ibid.
155. Ibid., 607-8.
156. For more of the case of Aug. Ha., see Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 128-30.
157. Ireland, "German Retrospect," 608.
158. Ibid.
159. See James Kiernan, "Review of Benjamin Tarnowski, Aberrant Manifestations of the Sexual Instinct" Neurol. Rev., 1886, 1, 39-43.
160. For more on this important sexologist who had an impact on the development of psychiatric concepts such as sadism and masochism, see Crozier, "James Kiernan and the Responsible Pervert," Internat. J. Law Psychiatry, 2002, 25, 331-50.
161. Anon., "Review of Tarnowski," Br. Med. J., 1886, 1, 118.
162. Ibid.
163. William Ireland, "Review of B. Tarnowski, Die Krankhafen Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes. Ein forensisch-psychiatrische Studie," inj. Ment. Sci., 1886, 32, 123.
164. An extract of this text was reprinted in the fly leaf of Charles Féré, The Evolution and Dissolution of the Sexual Instinct, 2nd ed. (Paris: Charles Carrington, 1904). It should be noted that Féré's and Tarnowski's translations were both published by Charles Carrington, a publisher who had a reputation for publishing "pornographic" texts in Paris for the London, market.
165. Anon., "Review of Krafft-Ebing," Br. Med. J., 24 June 1893, 1. T325. While the reviewer lauded the fact that Krafft-Ebing's "lewd" details remained in Latin, he does not seem to notice that more of the contemporary English readers would, have been able to read, these sections than the bulk of the book, if they had accessed, the German edition. I thank the late Roy Porter for this point.
166. Ibid.
167. Anon., "Review of Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. C. G. Chaddock (Philadelphia: F. A., Davis and Co., 1893), " J Ment. Sci., 1893, 39, 251-52, 251.
168. Ibid., 252. See Oosterhuis, Step-children of Nature, who suggests that the work was a best seller.
169. Ibid.
170. Anon., "Review of Raffalovich, The Development of Homo-Sexuality (Berlin: Fischer, 1895)," J- Ment. Sci., 1896, 42, 156-60, 157. Raffalovich's Uranisme et unisexualité was also reviewed in J. Ment. Sci., 1897, 43, 569-74, making many of the same comments as upon the pamphlet of 1895.
171. Ibid., 160.
172. Havelock Ellis, "Review of Albert Moll, Libido Sexualis," J. Ment. Sci., 1898, 44, 347-49, 347.