They
regarded sexual inversion as an episode (_syndrome_) in a more fundamental
process of hereditary degeneration, and compared it with such morbid
obsessions as dipsomania and kleptomania. From a somewhat more
medico-legal standpoint, the study of sexual inversion in France was
furthered by Brouardel, and still more by Lacassagne, whose stimulating
influence at Lyons has produced fruitful results in the work of many
pupils.[120]
Of much more importance in the history of the theory of sexual inversion
was the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (born at Mannheim in 1840 and
died at Graz in 1902), for many years professor of psychiatry at Vienna
University and one of the most distinguished alienists of his time. While
active in all departments of psychiatry and author of a famous textbook,
from 1877 onward he took special interest in the pathology of the sexual
impulse. His _Psychopathia Sexualis_ contained over two hundred histories,
not only of sexual inversion but of all other forms of sexual perversion.
For many years it was the only book on the subject and it long remained
the chief storehouse of facts.
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