subject and to advance its scientific study, it was at no time generally accepted.  Krafft-Ebing’s great service lay in the clinical enthusiasm with which he approached the study of sexual perversions.  With the firm conviction that he was conquering a great neglected field of morbid psychology which rightly belongs to the physician, he accumulated without any false shame a vast mass of detailed histories, and his reputation induced sexually abnormal individuals in all directions to send him their autobiographies, in the desire to benefit their fellow-sufferers.

It is as a clinician, rather than as a psychologist, that we must regard Krafft-Ebing.  At the outset he considered inversion to be a functional sign of degeneration, a partial manifestation of a neuropathic and psychopathic state which is in most cases hereditary.  This perverse sexuality appears spontaneously with the developing sexual life, without external causes, as the individual manifestation of an abnormal modification of the vita sexualis, and must then be regarded as congenital; or it develops as a result of special injurious influences working on a sexuality which had at first been normal, and must then be regarded as acquired.  Careful investigation of these so-called acquired cases, however, Krafft-Ebing in the end finally believed, would indicate that the predisposition consists in a latent homosexuality, or at least bisexuality, which requires for its manifestation the operation of accidental causes.  In the last edition of his work Krafft-Ebing was inclined to regard inversion as being not so much a degeneration as a variation, a simple anomaly, and acknowledged that his opinion thus approximated to that which had long been held by inverts themselves.[121]

At the time of his death, Krafft-Ebing, who had begun by accepting the view, at that time prevalent among alienists, that homosexuality is a sign of degeneration, thus fully adopted and set the seal of his authority on the view, already expressed alike by some scientific investigators as well as by inverts themselves, that sexual inversion is to be regarded simply as an anomaly, whatever difference of opinion there might be as to the value of the anomaly.  The way was even opened for such a view as that of Freud and most of the psychoanalysts today who regard a strain of homosexuality as normal and almost constant, with a profound significance for the psychonervous life.  In 1891 Dr. Albert Moll, of Berlin, published his work, Die Kontraere Sexualempfindung, which subsequently appeared in much enlarged and revised editions.  It speedily superseded all previous books as a complete statement and judicious discussion of sexual inversion.  Moll was not content merely to present fresh clinical material.  He attacked the problem which had now become of primary importance:  the nature and causes of sexual inversion.  He discussed the phenomena as a psychologist even more than as a physician, bearing