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This is a scholarly biography of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who lived from 1840 to 1902. Arguably the father of modern sexology,
he was famous for his seminal work, Psychopathia Sexualis, which had already been republished in twelve editions at the time of his death.
The author of Stepchildren of Nature, Harry Oosterhuis, is a professor of history at the University of Maastricht in Holland. Obviously, the area of sexuality and its vicissitudes is of special interest to him. He is the author of a number of previous works, including Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany, and is coauthor of Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left.
Although Stepchildren of Nature emerges as a cohesive piece of work, it appears to have developed from disparate essays that now form its various chapters. It provides an interesting historical review of the history of psychiatry, most notably in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to a lesser extent, in the late eighteenth century. This serves as background to Krafft-Ebing's development as a psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist, and sexologist.
The author discusses male and female homosexuality in the nineteenth century, including social and legal attitudes of the time. He also delineates the evolution of the definition of perversion, including sadism, masochism, and fetishism. He observes that to a large extent, the work of Krafft-Ebing and some of his contemporaries served to liberalize Western attitudes toward sexual deviation, from a highly moralistic and punitive stance to a more medicalized and humanistic approach. His work has also been employed to refute the arguments of Michel Foucault, who accused psychiatry and the medical establishment of coopting certain disorders in order to achieve professional power and influence.
To a large extent, psychiatry's involvement with forensic medicine in the nineteenth century parallels Krafft-Ebing's evolution from a clinical, organically oriented psychiatrist