Departing from deviance: a history of homosexual rights and emancipatory science in America

therapeutics. He even hypnotized guests as a party trick, drawing criticism from his more orthodox colleagues. Of course, Krafft-Ebing continues to be known, not for his asylum and clinic practice, but for his work with sexual "perverts" and the multiple editions of his Psychopathia sexualis, new editions of which have continued to appear with some regularity in a multitude of languages even in the decades since his death. One enterprising American publisher produced an edition, appropriately enough in 1969, that was explicitly advertised as pornography, a recital, it would appear, "of unnatural sex practices, weird auto-erotic methods, sex-lust-torture-much, much more". But as Oosterhuis dryly comments, "Today, fully three decades after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine that Psychopathia Sexualis is still read because of its titillating qualities" (p. 278). Once seen as a daring explorer of the sexual underworld of late-nineteenth-century society, in our time a chorus of Foucaultians and Szaszians (echoed in a more minor key, oddly enough, by their fierce critic, Edward Shorter) has more recently condemned Krafft-Ebing as anything but a progressive in the struggle against sexual repression. For such scholars, on the contrary, Krafft-Ebing has been the purveyor of a new medical disciplinary power, a "biopower" devoted to repressing and "controlling the free and easy pleasures ofthe body" (p. 7). It is a set of views against which Oosterhuis issues a sharp and closely reasoned dissent, which he buttresses with a careful analysis of Krafft-Ebing's relationships with his patients and correspondents. Just as it will not do to reduce Krafft-Ebing to a simple stick figure who embodies the stock materialist impulses of late-nineteenth-century psychiatry, so, Oosterhuis asserts, it will not do to see him as just a closet manipulator, the propagator of new and more subtle schemes of social control. Oosterhuis has produced a fine piece of scholarship. His book deserves a wide readership.