German psychiatrist whose Psychopathia Sexualis classified homosexuality as an inborn nervous disorder
In 1886 in Graz he published Psychopathia Sexualis, spreading words such as sadism and masochism and moving homosexuality from the judge to the physician.
Professor of psychiatry in Graz and Vienna. In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) he defined homosexuality as an inborn hereditary nervous disorder and argued that homosexuals, not being responsible for their disposition, should be treated by physicians rather than punished. The book became the standard nineteenth-century textbook of sexual pathology and moved homosexuality from the courtroom to the clinic.
Activities and affiliations
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1873–1902
Austria state institutionsMain
Science and technology
Related historical events
Psychopathia Sexualis and the classification of “perversion”
Born in Mannheim in the Grand Duchy of Baden, he studied medicine in Heidelberg and became professor of psychiatry in Strasbourg in 1872, in Graz in 1873 and in Vienna in 1889. He worked on the relation between psychiatry and criminal law and in 1886 published Psychopathia Sexualis, which grew through many editions into the standard nineteenth-century textbook of sexual pathology; its last edition held 238 case histories. Led to the subject by the writings of the jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, he defined homosexuality as an innate neuropathic disorder, a hereditary nervous disease. Homosexuals, he argued, were not responsible for their “malformation” and belonged in the hands of neurologists and psychiatrists rather than judges, so they should not be punished; the same argument made them objects of treatment. He held procreation to be the purpose of the sexual drive and called non-procreative sex perverse, but in a 1901 article in the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries he replaced the term “anomaly” with “differentiation”. He died in Graz in 1902.