The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- An Encyclopedia of Perversion -- (Chapter VIII, Part 3)

Though by no means immune to the crackpottery of his day, the truth is that Krafft-Ebing strove to understand sexual deviance in keeping with a motto recited to him by a masochist: 'to understand all is to cure all.'

His compassion helped persuade courts to take a more lenient approach toward many acts that aren't even classed as perversions anymore, let alone sex crimes.

In his mid-forties, the esteemed psychiatrist published a book that repulsed much of the medical establishment—and is still quite shocking now.

Psychopathia Sexualis was a bewildering compendium of case studies gleaned from Krafft-Ebing's own experience as well as medical texts, compiled in one easy-to-read encyclopedia of perversion.

The first edition, published in 1886, covered fifty-one case studies in just over 100 pages. By the time Krafft-Ebing died in 1902, the twelfth edition had swollen to more than 300 cases—a fraction of the 20,000 he'd accumulated.

Krafft-Ebing countered accusations of porn-mongering by arguing that his work would help doctors and lawyers assess sex crimes in court.

To prove it, he fig-leafed the dirty bits in Latin.

In contrast, the editor of my modern edition has not only helpfully translated the Latin into English, but also set them in boldface type, supposedly 'to illustrate Krafft-Ebing's editorial choices of what he found to be "particularly revolting".'

Not out of prurience, of course.

THE CASE OF Z

Case 81, profiling a Russian masochist called Z, gives an idea of the material:

'What oppressed him was the unnatural desire, recurring every four weeks, for mictio mulieris in os suum—' 

Or in my genital-warts-and-all version—'a woman to urinate in his mouth.'

'Puerum decem annos agens serva educatrix libidine mota ad corpus suum appressit et digitum ei in vaginam introduxit.' 

'When he was ten years old, his nurse, on a libidinous impulse, clutched him against her body and put his finger into her vagina.' 

'Quum postea fortuitu digito nasum tetigit, odore ejus valde delectatus fuit.' 

'When he happened to touch his nose with his finger later, the smell was intensely pleasurable to him.' 

'This immoral act developed into a lustful fantasy that made him believe he was lying bound inter femora mulieris cumbere—'

'—between a woman's thighs—'

'—coactus ut dormiat sub ejus podice et ut bibat ejus urinam.'

'—and forced to sleep under her buttocks and drink her urine.'