Queer Lives: Men's Autobiographies from Nineteenth-Century France

Part Two: Autobiographies as Case Studies: Doctors and Patients

1 2 3 4T 5 6 7 8 9T 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 73 part two Autobiographies as Case Studies Doctors and Patients In the second half of the nineteenth century much of the discussion in print about male homosexuality in France took place in a medical context — in articles in medical journals, chapters in scholarly treatises, or papers presented to learned societies. Physicians encountered the men about whom they wrote as patients in their private clinical practices or as inmates in the course of their work in asylums, hospitals, and prisons. They recorded their observations and amassed documentary evidence for studies of sexual deviance, which they would use when they served as expert witnesses in court cases dealing with sexual assaults, public offenses against decency, or other criminal offenses. The seven prominent French physicians whose works are excerpted in this section —Ambroise Tardieu, Jean-Martin Charcot, Valentin Magnan, Paul Garnier, André Antheaume, Léon Parrot, and Alexandre Lacassagne—practiced and published in the fields of forensic medicine and neurology, and it is in this context that they addressed questions of same-sex sexual attraction. Their scholarly writings reflected this concentration on the criminally insane (as they diagnosed their patients), but their presumed audience of medical colleagues included general readers as well—men and women who were eager to learn more about the developing field of sexology. It was a “hot new research agenda,” as Vernon Rosario, one of the leading historians of French medicine in the nineteenth century, has noted.1  1 2 3 4T 5 6 7 8 9T 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 74 PART TWO Dr. Ambroise Tardieu was the leading medical expert on “pederasty ” (the term most commonly used at the time for male samesex sexuality) in France in the middle of the nineteenth century. Attached to La Riboisière Hospital in Paris, he was frequently called upon to give his expert opinion on cases dealing with rape, sexual assault, or public offenses against decency. In 1857 he published many of his findings in Etude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs, which earned him the professorship of forensic studies at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. Until his death in 1879 he continued to revise his work, usually by adding new materials from the cases in which he had become involved. His Neo-Lamarckian belief that habitual actions caused perceptible changes in physical characteristics led him to describe and categorize the visible signs of active and passive sodomy for the benefit of other doctors and criminal justice authorities. In his writings he detailed not only the physical deformities, localized irritations, and venereal diseases believed to be associated with this kind of sexual behavior, but he also described what he believed to be the shape and size of the active sodomite’s penis and the passive sodomite’s anus.2 Tardieu did not restrict himself, however, to simply describing the physical signs of pederasty. He also believed that the trained expert could detect a habitual pederast through certain exterior attributes, such as his inevitable effeminacy. In his opinion, these external features were symbolic of the internal “moral perversions ,” “intellectual weaknesses,” and “affective faculties” of men who were attracted to other men.3 As Rosario has put it: “This effeminacy constituted a clear, fixed psychological and ontological marker of pederasty for Tardieu.”4 Tardieu also believed that these mental and moral failings easily led such men into the dangerous world of criminality. The typical pederast, Tardieu emphasized, was capable of shrewd manipulations and terrible acts of violence. He frequently engaged in petty thefts, grand larcenies, or blackmail schemes, and as Tardieu pointed out in a section analyzing the defendants in several sensational murder trials, violence often 1 2 3 4T 5 6 7 8 9T 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 PART TWO 75 accompanied these criminal activities. Not only was the pederast a health risk to himself and his partners, but he was also a danger to society.5 Tardieu based these conclusions on his study of numerous cases of sexual...