The world's first institute of sexual science lasted fourteen years before Nazis wrecked it
In 1919 Magnus Hirschfeld opened an institute in Berlin devoted to studying human sexuality, with a library of over 20,000 volumes and 35,000 photographs. Visitors came from across Europe for answers and treatment. On May 8, 1933, barely three months after the Nazis took power, it was destroyed and his books burned.
Sexology is the scientific study of human sexual interests, behaviour and function, borrowing methods from biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, epidemiology and more. Its subjects range from puberty and orientation to relationships, ageing and sexual dysfunction. Guides to lovemaking are ancient, from Ovid's Ars Amatoria to the Kama Sutra, but systematic research is younger. A survey of 3,558 registered prostitutes in 1830s Paris by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, published in 1837, a year after his death, is often called the first modern sex research.
Heinrich Kaan's 1844 book Psychopathia Sexualis marked, in Michel Foucault's view, the point when sexuality entered psychiatry, and Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard coined the word sexology in the United States in 1867. Richard von Krafft-Ebing's 1886 book, sharing Kaan's title, is credited with making it a scientific discipline. In England, Havelock Ellis challenged Victorian taboos, writing about homosexuality without treating it as disease, sin or crime. The first journal of the field appeared in 1908, featuring Freud and Alfred Adler, and the first academic society followed in 1913.
Germany led the early field, helped by relatively liberal laws. Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first organisation to campaign for homosexual and transgender rights, and he and Ellis both distinguished transgender people as a category separate from homosexuality. Nazi rule ended that dominance. Ernst Gräfenberg, remembered in the name of the G-spot, also published the first research leading to the intrauterine device.
After the Second World War, the centre of gravity moved west, partly through refugees fleeing Nazism. Alfred Kinsey founded his Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947, and large surveys of sexual behaviour gave birth to sex therapy. William Masters and Virginia Johnson published Human Sexual Response in 1966 and Human Sexual Inadequacy in 1970, founding their own institute in 1978. From the 1980s, HIV and AIDS redirected much research toward controlling the epidemic. Genetics, brain imaging and large internet surveys now drive the field, and in Quebec sexologists form a regulated profession.
Source: Sexology
