| Doctors at the
middle of the 1800s struggled to expand the market for their
services and to garner greater professional respect even though
few of the cures they offered did any good. Books like
Acton's Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs used
scare tactics to warn readers that even innocuous practices like
masturbation could be lethal, and that dangerous sexual disorders
like spermattorhea could occur surreptitiously. The best
course, Acton advised, was consultation with a qualified physician
who could diagnose and treat such insidious threats.
The medical specialty that enjoyed the least prestige was the
treatment of mental diseases. Early psychiatrists
("alienists" in the language of the day) lacked even
diagnoses for the disorders they claimed to treat. By the
1850s, psychiatrists began an orgy of classification that included
lists of sexual aberrations. Sexual inversion figured
prominently in these lists after Karl Westphal coined the term in
1869. Diagnostic enthusiasm reached its apex in Krafft-Ebing's
monumental Psychopathia Sexualis published in 1886.
Medicalization was greeted with mixed feelings by men who
called themselves urnings, inverts, and homosexuals. Many
were glad to be regarded as merely sick instead of desperately
depraved, but others like Marc Andre
Raffalovich insisted that they felt neither sick nor
sinful. |
