Bodies politic: disease, death and doctors in Britain 1650–1900

in the case ofRichard von Krafft-Ebing, it was by writing to sexologists with descriptions of sexual behaviour that challenged pathological interpretations. Other sexologists, such as Hirschfeld, were gay themselves, and so projected relatively positive images of homosexuality. This "gay-liberation" trend continued throughout the history of scientific writing about homosexuality. Either the participants in the research were themselves homosexual, such as Jan Gay, Alfred Gross, or Thomas Painter, or researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker linked into networks of homosexuals who supported the research that would present homosexuality in a more positive light. For the bulk of the pre-Hooker/pre-Kinsey work this involved using a psychiatric or medical model of homosexuality, and one of the achievements of Minton's study is to show that there was a concerted effort to overthrow this model, not just by homosexuals themselves, but also by psychiatrists who wanted homosexuality removed as a category from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and statistical manual, something which happened in 1973 after pressure from gay psychiatrists and other activists. This change was necessary; there were problems with the medical model. Homosexuality was represented as an immature sexual expression, especially in the American psychiatric world dominated by psychoanalysis. But research emerged within psychological and sexological studies showing that it was not uncommon, that it was not necessarily linked to prostitution, and that homosexuals were not necessarily unhappy or criminal. This research had a strong emancipatory aspect that Minton makes clear in his book. Much current work critical of sexology has not focused on these challenges to the medical model both in and outside psychiatry, but rather has framed itself in a neo-Foucaultian way, showing how doctors had the power to pathologize "perverts", and as such has missed many subtle points that Minton and Oosterhuis have brought to the fore. Minton's book is the best survey to date of medical opinions about homosexuality in America between 1900 and 1973. There still could have been more about the early sexologists, as many of the ideas employed by later scientists-such as using non-psychiatric, non-legal cases to demonstrate that not all homosexuals were criminal or mad-already existed in non-American sex psychology. There is also excessive attention paid to Thomas Painter, whose hitherto unstudied biography dominates the text. Nevertheless, the book is an important contribution to the history of sexology.