Krafft-Ebing wrote for lawyers and doctors who had to deal with sexual offences and had no vocabulary for them, and in doing so effectively created sexology: hundreds of case histories, and the classifications — sadism, masochism and the rest — that entered the language. Its diagnostic judgements, including its treatment of homosexuality as pathology, were abandoned long ago.
A landmark of medical history, best read as the historical document it is. Download the free EPUB.