Even the existence of such a treatise as this of Hirschfeld’s is enough to show how rapidly the study of this subject has grown.  A few years ago—­for instance, when Dr. Paul Moreau wrote his Aberrations du Sens Genesique—­sexual inversion was scarcely even a name.  It was a loathsome and nameless vice, only to be touched with a pair of tongs, rapidly and with precautions.  As it now presents itself, it is a psychological and medico-legal problem so full of interest that we need not fear to face it, and so full of grave social actuality that we are bound to face it.

FOOTNOTES: 

[113] In England aberration of the sexual instinct, or the tendency of men to feminine occupations and of women to masculine occupations, had been referred to in the Medical Times and Gazette, February 9, 1867; Sir G. Savage first described a case of “Sexual Perversion” in the Journal of Mental Science, vol. xxx, October, 1884.

[114] Moritz, Magazin fuer Erfahrungsseelenkunde, Berlin, Bd. viii.

[115] A full and interesting account of Hoessli and his book is given by Karsch in the Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. v, 1903, pp. 449-556.

[116] “Eugen Duehren” (Iwan Bloch) remarks, however (Neue Forschungen ueber den Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, p. 436), that de Sade in his Aline et Valcour seems to recognize that inversion is sometimes inborn, or at least natural, and apt to develop at a very early age, in spite of all provocations to the normal attitude.  “And if this inclination were not natural,” he makes Sarmiento say, “would the impression of it be received in childhood?...  Let us study better this indulgent Nature before daring to fix her limits.”  Still earlier, in 1676 (as Schouten has pointed out, Sexual-Probleme, January, 1910, p. 66), an Italian priest called Carretto recognized that homosexual tendencies are innate.

[117] For some account of Ulrichs see Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. i, 1899, p. 36.

[118] Horatio Brown, John Addington Symonds, a Biography, vol. ii, p. 344.

[119] Ulrichs scarcely went so far as to assert that both homosexual and heterosexual love are equally normal and healthy; this has, however, been argued more recently.

[120] Special mention may be made of L’Inversion Sexuelle, a copious and comprehensive, though sometimes uncritical book by Dr. J. Chevalier, published in 1893, and the Perversion et Perversite Sexuelles of Dr. Saint-Paul, writing under the pseudonym of “Dr. Laupts,” published in 1896 and republished in an enlarged form, under the title of L’Homosexualite et les Types Homosexuels, in 1910.

[121] Krafft-Ebing set forth his latest views in a paper read before the International Medical Congress, at Paris, in 1900 (Comptes-rendus, “Section de Psychiatrie,” pp. 421, 462; also in contributions to the Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. iii, 1901).