Nineteenth-century British psychiatric writing about homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: the missing story

Recent accounts of the emergence of sexology have addressed the role played by homosexuals and sexual radicals in framing the questions posed by psychiatrists. This work has focused largely upon American and Continental psychiatry (with regard to homosexuality), with attention to British sexologists sometimes being tied to contemporary feminist concerns with the sexual double standard. In both cases, psychiatrists are shown to be following other social movements. In the existing work, British psychiatrists of the nineteenth century who wrote about homosexuality have been largely ignored because it appears to have been assumed that very little material existed prior to Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion (1897). In this article, I demonstrate that there were a number of British psychiatric discussions of sexual perversions, and that these discourses show an engagement on the part of British psychiatrists with the theoretical issues that occupied their (mostly) Teutonic colleagues, rather than evidence of any other external driving force behind the production of sexological discourses. These sexological texts are either original papers, or reviews of Continental sources, both of which illustrate the importation of sexological ideas into Britain before the writing of Havelock Ellis.