Abstract
In the first flourishing of sexology from the late nineteenth century, the traditional period of ‘the making of the modern homosexual’, pivotal figures such as Havelock Ellis began to implant the notion of homosexuality as a natural, inborn variation exhibited by an anomalous minority.1 The Freudian challenge to this was relatively slow to take hold in Britain, but by the postwar years scientific and medical discourse was replete with notions of childhood sexuality, universal homosexual phases in adolescence, arrested psycho-sexual development, mother fixations and latent homosexuality.2 Alfred Kinsey, in his explosive studies into male and female sexuality in the US published in 1948 and 1953,3 had little patience for any psycho-sexual notion of the ‘normal’; but—in advocating the idea of a scale or spectrum of healthy expression and tastes—he too rejected the minoritizing sexological tradition and any discrete categories of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’.4
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953).
For a classic discussion of ‘minoritizing’ and ‘universalizing’, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
The BMA published its memorandum in a booklet, Homosexuality and Prostitution, in December 1955. The Observer (18 Dec. 1955, p. 6) commented that ‘it might have been better if the committee had kept to medical aspects, and had not discussed moral and legal issues on which doctors are not specially qualified to give verdicts’. Wildeblood, A Way of Life, p. 156, ridiculed the BMA’s moralizing: ‘“as though anybody would think of consulting a doctor about a question of morals”’. On the enduring strength of religious faith and of ‘discursive Christianity’ until the1960s, see Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001).
Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965) was a German-born psychiatrist who spent much of his career in the Department of Medical Genetics of the New York Psychiatric Institute. See his obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 123, 1 (July 1966), 105–6.
For example, Edward Glover, ‘Introduction’ to Westwood, Society and the Homosexual, p. 16; Eustace Chesser, Live and Let Live: The Moral of the Wolfenden Report (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 25, 37.
See the testimony of Dr T. D. Inch, Medical Adviser, Scottish Prison and Borstal Services (HO 345/15, 1 Nov. 1955, QQ3544–5), but also the doubts because of the alarming side effects (possible atrophy of the testicles and the development of breasts) expressed by Drs Matheson and Roper, Senior Medical Officers of Brixton and Wakefield Prisons respectively (HO 345/15, Q3454). See also the extended discussion by Drs Leonard Simpson, Ronald Gibson, T. C. N. Gibbens and Dennis Carroll on behalf of the BMA (HO 345/15, 15 Dec. 1955, QQ4261–71). For the history of hormone treatment, see Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012; 1st edn 1983), pp. 467–73. Turing, its most famous victim, opted for this kind of treatment to avoid prison after pleading guilty to acts of gross indecency. This followed the logic of section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, and an emphasis on the duty of the community to provide treatment for habitual sexual offenders (see F. L. Golla and R. Sessions Hodge, ‘Hormone Treatment of the Sexual Offender’, The Lancet, CCLVI, I (11 June 1949), 1006–7). For other forms of treatment of homosexuality of the period, including aversion therapy, see Michael King, Glenn Smith and Annie Bartlett, ‘Treatments of Homosexuality in Britain Since the 1950s—An Oral History’, British Medical Journal, 328, 7437 (21 Feb. 2004), 427–32; Tommy Dickinson, ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and Their Patients, 1935–74 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality 1895–1995 (London: HarperCollins, 1997).
On Jefferiss and St Mary’s, see Elsbeth Heaman, St Mary’s: The History of a London Teaching Hospital (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).
Franz J. Kallmann, Heredity in Health and Mental Disorder: Principles of Psychiatric Genetics in the Light of Comparative Twin Studies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), pp. 116–19.
The memorandum was written by D. W. Winnicott, FRCP, who was in charge of the Psychology Department at the hospital. See Clifford Yorke, ‘Winnicott, Donald Woods (1896–1971), paediatrician and psychoanalyst’, ODNB online, accessed 26 Feb. 2015; Brett Kahr, D. W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait (London: H. Karnac, 1996).
Published as Lennox Ross Broster and Walter Langdon-Brown, The Adrenal Cortex and Intersexuality (London: Chapman and Hall, 1938).
See Lesley A. Hall, ‘Chesser, Eustace (1902–1973), psychiatrist and social reformer’, ODNB online, accessed 30 Apr. 2013. A prolific writer and broadcaster, Chesser was perhaps best known for his first book, Love Without Fear: A Plain Guide to Sex Technique for Every Married Adult (London: Rich and Cowan, 1941).
Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912).
The Tavistock Clinic, founded in Tavistock Square, London, in 1920, was the brainchild of Dr Hugh Crichton-Miller. He and his collaborators wished to extend pioneering psychotherapeutic techniques for shell-shocked soldiers to civilians of modest means. It quickly became established as a leader in the analysis and treatment of nervous disorders. See H. V. Dicks, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), chap. 2; K. Loughlin, ‘Miller, Hugh Crichton- (1877–1959), psychotherapist’, ODNB online, accessed 26 Feb. 2015.
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (trans. James Strachey, New York: Basic Books, 1962; 1st edn 1905), essay II, ‘Infantile Sexuality’.
Kinsey et al., ‘Concepts of Normality and Abnormality in Sexual Behavior’, in Paul H. Hoch and Joseph Zubin (eds), Psychosexual Development in Health and Disease (Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, New York, June 1948) (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949), p. 12.
For accounts of the suicide in 1822 of Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh (London: Heinemann, 1959); John Bew, Castlereagh: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chaps. 20–1.
See Sir Samuel Romilly, Observations on the Criminal Law of England, as It Relates to Capital Punishments, and on the Mode in Which It Is Administered (3rd edn, London: Cadell and Davis, 1813), pp. 21–2.
Franz J. Kallmann, ‘Twin and Sibship Study of Overt Male Homosexuality’, American Journal of Human Genetics 4, 2 (June 1952), 136–46.
Curran, Lovibond, Scott, Whitby and Roberts were in attendance. For Kinsey (1894–1956), see James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York: Norton, 1997); Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); Donna J. Drucker, The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).
Theo Lang, ‘Studies on the Genetic Determination of Homosexuality’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 92, 1 (July 1940), 55–64. Lang worked at the Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. His studies during the Nazi era, drawing on lists of homosexuals supplied by the Munich and Hamburg police, posited that the apparent tendency for male homosexuals to have a higher than average number of brothers rather than sisters could be explained by the fact that a proportion of homosexuals were ‘at least to a certain extent defined as intersexes’ (p. 55).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 Brian Lewis
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lewis, B. (2016). Medical Practitioners and Scientists. In: Wolfenden’s Witnesses. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321503_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321503_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-32148-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32150-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)