The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Bona Fide Freaks -- (Chapter VIII, Part 4)

And on and on—and on—it goes, case after Germanically detailed case of characters who would make headlines today but also make you wonder whether sex as we know it (or not) has changed at all since the nineteenth century.

On the one hand, for instance, there's one of Krafft-Ebing's early patients, a twenty-year-old farmer's daughter who couldn't stop masturbating.

The doctor tried hydrotherapy and various 'methods of coercion' to cure her before realizing the real reason she could never scratch her very particular itch: she was infested with maggots.

On the other hand, many of his 'perverts' are easily recognizable as our sexual ancestors, in spirit if not in deed: there are hordes of homosexuals (including sailors cottaging in public toilets and gay-for-pay soldiers), cross-dressing men and women (such as an officer who dressed up in a pink tutu), child killers and animal abusers (including a fowl-torturer known to prostitutes as 'Mr. Chicken'), proto-pony boys, leather fetishists, assorted sadists and people who enjoyed fisting (one man fantasized about inserting his arm, 'all the way up to the shoulder blade, into a woman's vagina') and genital torture (a captain forced his lover 'to place leeches on her genitals before coitus… The woman finally became very anemic and, as a result, insane').

BUT ONLY WITH THEIR LEFT FEET

Not to mention the bona fide freaks: a merchant who masturbated 'by means of a pocket electric battery' and orgasmed by burning holes in women's clothes on the street… a man who would have a woman lie down in a ball gown and then ambush her ('he jumped on top of her and defecated on her breasts… while doing this, he ejaculated')… a misogynist who murdered an old woman and was about to flog the corpse but 'was unable to do so because of his conscience; he therefore cut off the breasts and genitalia with a knife, cooked them at home, and ate them')… a physician who'd been introduced to medicine by his family doctor, who'd also masturbated with him as a boy and shown him their sperm under the microscope ('he dilated my anus with instruments')… a civil servant attracted to women who limped but only with their left feet… and finally the case of X, a man who 'only loved men with large, bushy moustaches':

'One day he met his ideal. He invited him home, but was unspeakably disappointed when the man removed an artificial moustache. Only when the visitor returned the ornament to his upper lip did he exercise his charm over X once more and restored X to complete virility.'