It is now,
however, regarded by some as the first serious attempt to deal with the
problem of homosexuality since Plato's _Banquet_.[115]
Some years later, in 1852, Casper, the chief medico-legal authority of his
time in Germany,--for it is in Germany that the foundations of the study
of sexual inversion have been laid,--pointed out in Casper's
_Vierteljahrsschrift_ that pederasty, in a broad sense of the word, was
sometimes a kind of "moral hermaphroditism," due to a congenital psychic
condition, and also that it by no means necessarily involved sodomy
(_immissio penis in anum_). Casper brought forward a considerable amount
of valuable evidence concerning these cardinal points, which he was the
first to note,[116] but he failed to realize the full significance of his
observations, and they had no immediate influence, though Tardieu, in
1858, admitted a congenital element in some pederasts.
The man, however, who more than anyone else brought to light the phenomena
of sexual inversion had not been concerned either with the medical or the
criminal aspects of the matter. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (born in 1825 near
Aurich), who for many years expounded and defended homosexual love, and
whose views are said to have had some influence in drawing Westphal's
attention to the matter, was a Hanoverian legal official (_Amtsassessor_),
himself sexually inverted.
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