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It is almost impossible to appreciate today the repressive atmosphere with regard to sex which it was Havelock Ellis's main historical importance to have played a major part in dispelling. Even the noted Dr. Hack Tuke, editor of the Journal of Mental Science, to which Ellis was a contributor and who was a friend of Ellis, advised against the publication of his first volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. London medical publishers were confessedly afraid to handle the subject, and after he had achieved publication, even the Library of the British Museum, although it acquired Ellis, refrained from cataloguing him. The American Journal of Insanity was definitely unsympathetic to the first two volumes of the Studies. Reviewing them in 1902, it wrote briefly of the first that it did 'not seem to throw any specially new light upon the subjects', and of the second that it was 'of little real value', being filled with the 'pornographic imaginings of perverted minds', and that 'whether any practical results can come from such labor is doubtful'. But the 'purely scientific spirit' of Ellis was not, it was said, doubted.
In contradistinction to the great advances in neurology, the triviality of the medicopsychological literature of the time, further vitiated by theologism, was pronounced. In the years when Ellis attended medical school from which he graduated in 1899, the only instruction medical students received which might even inaccurately be called psychological, was an unqualified warning against contraception.
The Alienist and Neurologist of St. Louis—in which portions of the Studies were given advance publication—referred as early as 1899 to the arraignment of 'Havelock Ellis's great book, Sexual Inversion', and in 1902 reported at serious length on its second edition. In the interim—in connection with