Berlin forensic physician who held some same-sex desire to be innate
A Berlin forensic physician. He studied in Berlin, Göttingen and Halle, took his doctorate in 1819, and from 1839 until his death was full professor of forensic and public medicine at the University of Berlin; from 1841 he was also the city’s court physician. In 1852 he founded a quarterly of forensic and public medicine, whose first volume carried his paper on establishing rape and pederasty, and in 1856 he published his Handbook of Forensic Medicine. Casper’s dictum, on how fast a body decays in air, water and earth, bears his name. As a medical student he wrote the librettos of the young Felix Mendelssohn’s first four operas.
Also known as: Hirsch Casper
Activities and affiliations
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1839–1864
Germany state institutionsProfessor of forensic medicine, University of BerlinMain
Science and technology -
1841–1864
Germany state institutionsCourt physician of Berlin
Science and technology
Career Timeline
- 1819Doctorate in medicine at Halle
- 1824Privatdozent at the University of Berlin
- 1825Extraordinary professor in Berlin and member of the Brandenburg medical board
- 1839–1864.02.24Full professor of forensic and public medicine, University of Berlin
- 1841–1864.02.24Court physician of Berlin
- 1852–1864.02.24Editor of the Vierteljahrsschrift für gerichtliche und öffentliche Medizin
- 1856Published the Handbook of Forensic Medicine
Forensic medicine
Casper edited a medical weekly from 1833 to 1851 and from 1852 until his death a quarterly of forensic and public medicine. In its first volume his paper on rape and pederasty and how a court physician should establish them (1852) dealt with the forensic assessment of pederasty cases and stated that in many of them the attraction to men was inborn. His two-volume Handbook of Forensic Medicine (1856) went through several editions and was translated into English and French; after his death his nephew Carl Liman carried on revising it. In his late Klinische Novellen zur gerichtlichen Medicin he restated the same view more firmly.
Ulrichs’s witness
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs cited Casper again and again as the weightiest authority for the inborn nature of the Urning’s disposition. In Memnon (1868), §45, he quoted the sentence from the 1852 quarterly that the attraction of man to man was inborn in many of these unfortunates, and the passage in the Klinische Novellen where Casper wrote that men who love men are drawn to them by a “wondrous, dark and inexplicable inborn urge”, and remarked that Casper had come very close to his own theory without finding its thread, the female sex of the soul. On punishment, too, Ulrichs set him against Virchow as the “more justly minded” physician who saw innateness as a ground of excuse and had no objection to abolishing the penalty.