For many years Ulrichs was alone in his efforts to gain scientific recognition for congenital homosexuality.  He devised (with allusion to Uranos in Plato’s Symposium) the word uranian or urning, ever since frequently used for the homosexual lover, while he called the normal heterosexual lover a dioning (from Dione).  He regarded uranism, or homosexual love, as a congenital abnormality by which a female soul had become united with a male body—­anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa—­and his theoretical speculations have formed the starting point for many similar speculations.  His writings are remarkable in various respects, although, on account of the polemical warmth with which, as one pleading pro domo, he argued his cause, they had no marked influence on scientific thought.[119]

This privilege was reserved for Westphal.  After he had shown the way and thrown open his journal for their publication, new cases appeared in rapid succession.  In Italy, also, Ritti, Tamassia, Lombroso, and others began to study these phenomena.  In 1882 Charcot and Magnan published in the Archives de Neurologie the first important study which appeared in France concerning sexual inversion and allied sexual perversions.  They regarded sexual inversion as an episode (syndrome) in a more fundamental process of hereditary degeneration, and compared it with such morbid obsessions as dipsomania and kleptomania.  From a somewhat more medico-legal standpoint, the study of sexual inversion in France was furthered by Brouardel, and still more by Lacassagne, whose stimulating influence at Lyons has produced fruitful results in the work of many pupils.[120]

Of much more importance in the history of the theory of sexual inversion was the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (born at Mannheim in 1840 and died at Graz in 1902), for many years professor of psychiatry at Vienna University and one of the most distinguished alienists of his time.  While active in all departments of psychiatry and author of a famous textbook, from 1877 onward he took special interest in the pathology of the sexual impulse.  His Psychopathia Sexualis contained over two hundred histories, not only of sexual inversion but of all other forms of sexual perversion.  For many years it was the only book on the subject and it long remained the chief storehouse of facts.  It passed through many editions and was translated into many languages (there are two translations in English), enjoying an immense and not altogether enviable vogue.

Krafft-Ebing’s methods were open to some objection.  His mind was not of a severely critical order.  He poured out the new and ever-enlarged editions of his book with extraordinary rapidity, sometimes remodelling them.  He introduced new subdivisions from time to time into his classification of sexual perversions, and, although this rather fine-spun classification has doubtless contributed to give precision to the