a Sexualis_ contained over two hundred histories,
not only of sexual inversion but of all other forms of sexual perversion.
For many years it was the only book on the subject and it long remained
the chief storehouse of facts. It passed through many editions and was
translated into many languages (there are two translations in English),
enjoying an immense and not altogether enviable vogue.

Krafft-Ebing's methods were open to some objection. His mind was not of a
severely critical order. He poured out the new and ever-enlarged editions
of his book with extraordinary rapidity, sometimes remodelling them. He
introduced new subdivisions from time to time into his classification of
sexual perversions, and, although this rather fine-spun classification has
doubtless contributed to give precision to the subject and to advance its
scientific study, it was at no time generally accepted. Krafft-Ebing's
great service lay in the clinical enthusiasm with which he approached the
study of sexual perversions. With the firm conviction that he was
conquering a great neglected field of morbid psychology which rightly
belongs to the physician, he accumulated without any false shame a vast
mass of detailed histories, and his reputation induced sexually abnormal
individuals in all directions to send him their autobiographies, in the
desire to benefit their fellow-sufferers.

It is as a clinician, rather than as a psychologist, that we must regard
Krafft-Ebing. At the outset he considered inversion to be a functional
sign of degeneration, a partial manifestation of a neuropathic and
psychopathic state which is in most cases hereditary. This perverse
sexuality appears spontaneously with the developing sexual life, without
external causes, as the individual manifestation of an abnormal
modification of the _vita sexualis_, and must then be regarded as
congenital; or it develops as a result of special injurious influences
working on a sexuality which had at first been normal, and must then be
regarded as acquired. Careful investigation of these so-called acquired
cases, however, Krafft-Ebing in the end finally believed, would indicate
that the predisposition consists in a latent homosexuality, or at least
bisexuality, which requires for its manifestation the operation of
accidental causes. In the last edition of his work Krafft-Ebing was
inclined to regard inversion as being not so much a degeneration as a
variation, a simple anomaly, and ackno