Lesley Hall

The strangeways research laboratory : Archives in the contemporary medical archives centre

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The Eugenics Society archives in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre.

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A "remarkable collection": The Papers of Frederick Parkes Weber FRCP (1863-1962).

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Book Reviews: Sexuality at the fin de siècle: the making of a “central problem”

This volume takes as its agenda not the posited fundamental change in understanding sexuality during the later nineteenth century, but an attempt to understand the actual place of sexuality within culture and society at that time. The contributors shift the focus from the usual interest in the developing discourses around homosexuality and female hysteria, and the social anxieties around prostitution, reproduction, obscenity, and sexually transmitted diseases, to reveal a swirling penumbra of other concerns also related to the realm of the sexual which suggest the instability involved in endeavours to establish sexuality as the “central problem” and to define its terms, both at the period in question, and in more recent historiographical analyses. A case is made for sexuality at the fin de siecle having been more manifest and visible, at least in the cases of certain kinds of bodies undergoing certain kinds of scrutiny, than the prevalent discourse of concealment/ uncovering/definition would indicate. Several of these essays locate sexuality and its anomalies and problems within the arena of performance or spectacle, concurrent with and even overlapping the new medico-scientific view of “freakish” differences. Other essays usefully indicate the extent to which new modes of understanding anomaly and difference were being ventilated in non-elite forms such as the French middle-brow novel, as well as deployed in the popular culture venues of cabarets and sideshows. In the first part—‘Displaying and examining the sexual body’—Elizabeth Stephens examines nineteenth-century anatomical museums, a phenomenon widespread through Europe and North America exploiting curiosity about forbidden bodily knowledge and anomalous or freakish bodies, arguing for a porosity of influence between these increasingly stigmatized institutions and the investigations of the medical establishment. Stephens cites the photographic record of Charcot’s hysterics, who are also discussed by Jonathan Marshall using Butlerian notions of the performative. Gabrielle Houbre discusses changing perceptions of intersex conditions. Part II discusses ‘Symptoms and problems’. Peter Cryle considers ‘The aesthetics of the spasm’. Heike Bauer examines the rather slippery usage of female sexuality in non-western societies within discourses of “civilisation” and “degeneration”. Michael Wilson looks at the depiction of same-sex desire in popular (French) novels of the turn of the century, with some examination of the handling by popular medical texts of the same topic. Part II takes as its theme ‘Decentering sexuality’, with essays by Alison Moore and Christopher E Forth on other bodily functions which influenced emotions about and attitudes towards sexuality: excretion and eating, and Carolyn Dean’s exploration of the formulation of homosexuality as “an open secret” cognate with Jewishness, and the distinction between toleration and acceptance. The ‘Afterword’ by Vernon Rosario, demonstrates from his clinical practice the extent to which what might be considered long superseded concepts of sexuality and gender identity “persist in deep ways in medicine” as well as in popular and governmental mindsets. The majority of the essays, though not all, deal fairly specifically with the French context and the extent to which the arguments made might be extended to other areas of Europe or North America and how culturally specific some of them were is thus somewhat problematic. We might also ask how particular to the fin de siecle was the confusion and blurring of categories which this volume examines, or whether something similar might be found at any particular historical epoch, with competing paradigms always in play. Rosario, indeed, draws specific attention to the persistence of attempts to establish a biological basis for “sexual deviancy” and the deployment of whatever is the privileged science of the period to make essentially similar cases for “born that way”. The volume, therefore, raises a number of interesting questions for further exploration.

Book Review: Solitary sex: a cultural history of masturbation

Is there anything new to be said about the history of masturbation? A fifty-year tradition of articles as well as at least one preceding monograph have explored the perennially intriguing cultural construct of masturbation within the western medical tradition as a medically, as well as morally, deleterious practice, enduring from the first decades of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. Although a number of questions remained outstanding, these have not all been addressed in Solitary sex. Laqueur displays a curious (in more than one sense) interest in female masturbation. In gazing at the masturbating female, he seems to have overlooked the extent to which the discourses about the evils of onanism were to a significant degree about anxieties to do with the male body and masculinity. Undoubtedly there were recurrent, if highly localized, panics about self-abuse among women, but a case could be made that for long periods the masturbating woman was largely perceived as an innately pathological figure with some physical or mental defect, rather than anywoman. Whereas for men, masturbation was seen as something which could, unless precautions were taken, overcome any male, with dire consequences. All men were menaced by this spectre, as can be seen from the vast torrent of literature, from sermons to commercial quack handbills, directed towards the habit. Laqueur does not engage with, or even acknowledge, several articles which have taken this approach, although he has, on internal evidence, encountered them. He even tries to account for the differential between the vast number of anguished queries received by Marie Stopes (not, as Laqueur implies, a medical doctor, but a PhD in botany, one of a number of in themselves minor, but cumulatively irritating, errors) from men about the harm potentially done by masturbation, and the extremely few, largely much less agonized, queries from women, by arguing that women were worried about it, but would not have written to Stopes. Given the lack of other resources of advice for the sexually perturbed at the time, it is hard to believe that if women had been as concerned as men were about autoerotic practice, they would have failed to consult her in large numbers. His argument for this line of reasoning, that “in the clinical casework of Freud and his colleagues, women seemed to suffer the most from solitary sex” (pp. 374–5), is not entirely convincing. One is tempted to murmur, given the pervasive male fears on the topic among that very generation, “projection …”. And indeed, does not Laqueurs claim that female masturbation has been, historically, characterized as “liberating, ecstatic, dreamy and lyrical”, in contrast to the male act, perceived as “abject, humiliating, and decidedly second-rate” (p. 406), speak of a cultural disgust at the sexual male body, from which this practice liberates the fortunate woman? While some accounts of masturbation have made far too much of the Victorians, or perhaps one should say “the Victorian” as popularly imagined, is it really possible to make a segue from the late eighteenth century to the very late nineteenth or early twentieth century with only passing allusions to the interim period (refreshing though the absence of William Acton may be)? This tends to lead to an assumption that, once it was in place, the masturbation discourse was fixed and unchanging until it was eventually superseded or eroded (there is also little attention paid to the significant variations between different national cultures). This is related to what appears to be the ambition to create a grand narrative of the rise and decline of masturbatory panic. Might it not rather be possible that there is not one story, but several, overlapping and intertwining, stories? Perhaps the reason for the initial success and enduring significance of the fears begun by Onania was that they could occupy many niches, that they enabled a variety of narratives. Solitary sex, in spite of its length, and although some areas are dealt with in minute detail, fails to provide an exhaustive or definitive account of the rise and decline of masturbation mania. It will doubtless be of interest to the general reader unacquainted with the existing historiography, but for specialists in the history of gender, sexuality, and medicine, it will come as something of a disappointment.

Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. The archive of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine.

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