may even be perverted into a false channel. Tarnowsky has already published this experience. I can thoroughly confirm it, and am prepared to define the conditions of this acquired, or, in other words, this cultivated perversion of the sexual instinct in the following terms. The fundamental or ground predisposition is a neuropathic hereditary bias. The exciting or efficient cause is sexual abuse, and more particularly onanism. The etiological centre of gravity has to be sought in hereditary disease; and I think it is questionable whether an untainted individual is capable of homosexual feelings at all."[1]
Krafft-Ebing's theory seems then to be that all cases of acquired sexual inversion may be ascribed in the first place to morbid predispositions inherited by the patient (Belastung), and in the second place to onanism as the exciting cause of the latent neuropathic ailment.
He excludes the hypothesis of a physiological and healthy deflection from the normal rule of sex. "I think it questionable," he says, "whether the untainted individual (das unbelastete Individuum) is capable of homosexual feelings at all." The importance of this sentence will be apparent when we come to deal with Krafft-Ebing's account of congenital sexual inversion, which he establishes upon a large induction of cases observed in his own practice.
For the present we have the right to assume that Krafft-Ebing regards sexual inversion, whether "ac-
- ↑ P. 73. The italics are the translator's. The adjective homosexual, though ill-compounded of a Greek and a Latin word, is useful, and has been adopted by medical writers on this topic. Unisexual would perhaps be better.
