Magyar László szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 166-169. (Budapest, 1999)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - Porter, Roy: Perversion in the past. — Perverzió a múltban

after 1870, in the writings of a succession of physicians, psychiatrists and new and selfstyled sexologists. The work of the German psychiatrist Westphal (1870) is often cited as the foundation text; after him came Richard Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, Mantegazza, Lombroso, Magnan, Magnus Hirschfeld, Bloch, Freud, of course, and, in Britain, Havelock Ellis.

7 This is not to imply that, before the fin de siècle, everything sexual was viewed as all of a piece. Rather, a different language of differentiation was traditionally deployed: that of "natural" and "unnatural" practices. These had been distinguished throughout medieval and early modern times according to their tendency to procreation: natural sex made babies, unnatural sex didn't. This conceptualization of the natural and the unnatural was both descriptive and prescriptive; it was thought both to depict instinct and to direct morals. The sexual best-sellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the Tableau de l'Amour Conjugal by the French surgeon, Nicolas Venette, and Aristotle's Master-Piece for instance — give their approval, greater or lesser, to erotic acts liable to lead to pregnancy, and condemn all behaviour designed to thwart or bypass conception.

8 Terms like "frauds against nature" were commonly used to censure coitus interruptus, and masturbation was increasingly condemned.

9 In his A Treatise of all the Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1709), the English surgeon, John Marten, fumed that sex performed "by a Man's putting his erected Penis, into another Persons ... Mouth, using Friction, &c. between the Lips ", was „so very Beastly and so much to be abhorr'd, as to cause at the mentioning or but thinking of it, the utmost detestation, and loathing"} Heterosexual genital intercourse could itself be denounced as unnatural if performed excessively or unseasonably (e. g., during menstruation); in such cases it was believed that conception would not occur, or, if it did, the offspring would be unnatural conceptions, perhaps monstrosities. As is evident, the traditional criteria for good and bad sex For excellent recountings of the rise of these formulations of abnormal sexuality, see Foucault, M.: Histoire de la sexualité, vol. \.La volonté de savoir (Paris, Gallimard, 1976) — transi. Hurley, R. The history of sexuality: introduction (London, Allen Lane, 1978); Weeks, J.: Sex, politics and society: the regulation of sexuality since 1800 (London, Longman, 1981); idem: Sexuality and its discontents: meanings, myths and modern sexualities (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); idem: "Discourse, desire and sexual deviance, some problems in a history of homosexuality ", in Plummer, K. (ed): The making of the modern homosexual (London, Hutchinson, 1981), pp. 76—111; idem: Against nature (London, Rivers Oram Press, 1991); Mosse, G.: "Decadence and the construction of masculinity", in Porter, R., Teich, M. (eds): Sexual knowledge, sexual science: the history of attitudes to sexuality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994); Vern L. Bullough, V. L.: "The physician and research into human sexual behaviour in nineteenth-century Germany ", Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1989, p. 247. For discussion, see Porter, R.: „The secrets of generation display'd: Aristotle's master-piece in eighteenthcentury England", in Maccubbin, R. P.: (ed): Unauthorized sexual behaviour during the enlightenment (Special issues of eighteenth centwy life), vol. ns, 3 (May 1985), pp 1—21; idem: „Spreading carnal knowledge or selling dirt cheap? Nicolas Venette'

s Tableau de l'amour conjugal in eighteenth century England", Journal of European Studies, 1984. vol. 14, pp. 233-—255; idem: "Love, sex and medicine: Nicolas Venette and his Tableau de l'amour conjugal", in Wagner, P. (ed): Erotica and the enlightenment (Frankfurt, Lang, 1990), pp. 90—122. See the discussion in Foucault, M.: The history of sexuality, p. 4L; on masturbation, see Stengers, J., Van Neck, A.: Histoire d'une grande peur: la masturbation (Brussels, University of Brussels, 1984). Marten, J.: A treatise of all the symptoms of the venereal disease, in both sexes (London, S. Crouch, 1708), p. 68.