This question of physical diagnosis leads them into a severe critique of Tardieu. Their polemic attacks each of the points which he attempted to establish. I must content myself by referring to the passage of their work which deals with the important topic.[16] Suffice it here to say that they reject all signs as worse than doubtful, except a certain deformation of one part of the body, which may possibly be taken as the proof of habitual prostitution, when it occurs in quite young persons. Of course they admit that wounds, violent abrasions of the skin, in certain places, and some syphilitic affections strongly favour the presumption of a criminal act. Finally, after insisting on the insecurity of Tardieu's alleged signs, and pointing out the responsibility assumed by physicians who base a judgment on them, the two Germans sum up their conclusions in the following words (p. 178): "It is extremely remarkable that while Tardieu mentions 206 cases, and communicates a select list of 19, which appear to him to exhibit these peculiar conformations of the organs, he can only produce one single instance where the formation seemed indubitable. Let anyone peruse his 19 cases, and he will be horrified at the unhesitating condemnations pronounced by Tardieu." The two notes of exclamation which close this sentence in the original are fully justified. It is indeed horrifying to think that a person, implicated in some foul accusation, may have his doom fixed by a doctrinaire like Tardieu. Antipathy and ignorance in judges and the public, combined with erroneous canons of evidence in the expert, cannot fail to lead in such cases to some serious miscarriage of justice.
Passing from the problem of diagnosis and the polemic against Tardieu, it must be remarked that Casper was the first writer of this class to lay down the distinction between inborn and acquired perversion of the sexual instinct. The law does not recognise this distinction. If a criminal act be proved, the psychological condition of the agent is legally indifferent—unless it can be shown that he was clearly mad and irresponsible, in which case he may be consigned to a lunatic asylum instead of a jail. But Casper and Liman, having studied the question of sexual maladies in general, and given due weight to the works of Ulrichs, call attention to the broad differences which exist between persons in whom abnormal appetites are innate and those in whom they are acquired. Their companion sketches of the two types deserve to be translated and presented in a somewhat condensed form.[17]
"In the majority of persons who are subject to this vice, it is congenital; or at any rate the sexual inclination can be followed back into the years of childhood, like a kind of physical hermaphroditism. Sexual contact with a woman inspires them with real disgust. Their imagination delights in handsome young men, and statues or pictures of the same. In the case of this numerous class of pæderasts there is therefore no depraved fancy at work, no demoralisation through satiety of natural sexual appetite,[18] Their congenital impulse explains the fact, moreover, that very many pæderasts are addicted to what may be termed a Platonic voluptuousness, and feel themselves drawn towards the objects of their desire with a warmth of passion more fervent than is common in the relations of the opposed sexes; that, in other cases again, they are satisfied with embracements, from which they derive a mutual pleasure. Westphal maintains that this anomalous direction of the sexual appetite is more often the symptom of a psychopathical, neuropathical condition than people commonly suppose."[19]
"In the case of another class of men, upon the contrary, the taste for this vice has been acquired in life, and is the result of over-satiety with natural pleasures. People of this stamp sometimes indulge their gross appetites alternately with either sex. I once observed a man, after contracting a venereal disease with women, adopt pæderasty out of fear of another infection; but he was, it must be admitted, a weak-minded individual. In all the great towns of Europe the vice goes creeping around, unobserved by the uninitiated. It appears that there is no inhabited spot of the globe where it may not be discovered. I said, unobserved by the uninitiated, advisedly. In antiquity the members of the sect had their own means of mutual recognition. And at the present time, these men know each other at first sight; moreover, they are found everywhere, in every station of society, without a single exception. 'We recognise each other at once,' says the writer of a report which I shall communicate below: 'A mere glance of the eye suffices; and I have never been deceived. On the Rigi, at Palermo, in the Louvre, in the Highlands of Scotland, in Petersburg, on disembarking at the port of Barcelona, I have found people, never seen by me before, and whom I discriminated in a second.' Several men of this sort whom I have known (continues Casper) are certainly accustomed to dress and adorn themselves in a rather feminine way. Nevertheless, there are indisputable pæderasts, who present an entirely different aspect, some of them elderly and negligent in their attire, and people of the lower classes, distinguished by absolutely nothing in their exterior from other persons of the same rank."
Medico-juristic science made a considerable step when Casper adopted this distinction of two types of sexual inversion. But, as is always the case in the analysis of hitherto neglected phenomena, his classification falls far short of the necessities of the problem. While treating of acquired sexual inversion, he only thinks of debauchees. He does not seem to have considered a deeper question—deeper in its bearing upon the way in which society will have to deal with the whole problem—the question of how far these instincts are capable of being communicated by contagion to persons in their fullest exercise of sexual vigour. Taste, fashion, preference, as factors in the dissemination of anomalous passions, he has left out of his account. It is also, but this is a minor matter, singular that he should have restricted his observations on the freemasonry among pæderasts to those in whom the instinct is acquired. That exists quite as much or even more among those in whom it is congenital.
The upshot of the whole matter, however, is that the best book on medical jurisprudence now extant repudiates the enormities of Tardieu's method, and lays it down for proved that "the majority of persons who are subject" to sexual inversion come into the world, or issue from the cradle, with their inclination clearly marked.
V.
LITERATURE—MEDICINE.
Medical writers upon this subject are comparatively numerous in French and German literature, and they have been multiplying rapidly of late years. The phenomenon of sexual inversion is usually regarded in these books from the point of view of psychopathic or neuropathic derangement, inherited from morbid ancestors, and developed in the patient by early habits of self-abuse.
What is the exact distinction between "psychopathic" and "neuropathic" I do not know. The former term seems intelligible in the theologian's mouth, the latter in a physician's. But I cannot understand both being used together to indicate different kinds of pathological diathesis. What is the soul, what are the nerves? We have probably to take the two terms as indicating two ways of considering the same phenomenon; the one subjective, the other objective; "psychopathic" pointing to the derangement as observed in the mind emotions of its subject; "neuropathic" to the derangement as observed in anomalies of the nervous system.