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Pathologising White Male Sexuality in late Nineteenth-Century Australia through the medical prism of excess and constraint

2010; Routledge; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1031461x.2010.493949

1940-5049

Lisa Featherstone,

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

Abstract This paper will explore the constructions of white male sexuality in late nineteenth-century Australia by the medical profession. In a period where female sexuality was always suspect, male sexuality, too, was brought into question, and the male body was increasingly constructed as vulnerable to sexual excess and sexual pathology. If male sexuality was to be active and dynamic, this could readily go too far, rendering men merely a slip away from deviance. Here, I will consider these notions of excess and constraint through an examination of sexual norms and perceived perversions, including sexual excess, sodomy and masturbation. Notes 1This paper owes more than its fair share of thanks. Much of the initial work for this article was done while I was the C. H. Currey Memorial Fellow at the State Library of NSW: I would like to sincerely thank the Library for its invaluable assistance. The paper was given at the Sydney Feminist History Group, where feedback was invaluable. Various friends and colleagues read drafts of this paper, including Mary Spongberg, Cathy Hawkins, Rebecca Jennings and Amanda Kaladelfos. Finally, thanks are due to the editors and the anonymous reviewers, whose comments were both generous and instructive. 2Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, ‘The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America’, Journal of American History, 60 (1973–4): 332–356; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th-century America’, Social Research, 39, no. 4 (1972): 652–78; Ann Douglas Wood, ‘“The Fashionable Diseases”: Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History iv, no. 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The division of labour in Australian Health Care (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983); TS Pensabene, The rise of the medical practitioner in Victoria (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1980). 10Lisa Featherstone, Breeding and Feeding: A Social History of Mothers and Medicine in Australia, 1880–1925 (PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2004); Milton Lewis, “Populate or Perish”: Aspects of Infant and Maternal Health in Sydney 1870–1939” (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1976); Milton Lewis, ‘Milk, Mothers and Infant Welfare’ in Twentieth Century Sydney. Studies in Urban and Social History ed. Jill Roe (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1980), 193–207; Kerreen Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernising the Australian Home, 1880–1940 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985); Desley Deacon, ‘Taylorism in the home: The medical profession, the infant welfare movement and the deskilling of women’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 21, no. 2 (July 1985): 161–73; Janet McCalman, Sex and Suffering. Women's Health and a Woman's Hospital. The Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne 1856–1996 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998). In the later period see Kerreen Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies. The Forgotten Women's Movement (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001). 11T. K. Hamilton, ‘Notes on Exhibits made by TK Hamilton’, AMG (November 1883): 40; John Wilkins, ‘An operation on the penis by electrolysis’, AMG (May 1888): 198–9. 12H. V. Critchley Hinder, ‘Prostatic Hypertrophy’, AMG (25 January 1901): 28. 13James George Beaney, The Generative System and its Function in Health and Disease. 4th ed. (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1883), 280; George Fullerton, The Family Medical Guide (Sydney: William Maddock, 1884), 145. 14For a broader discussion of this see John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London: Yale University Press, 1999). 15Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12, 18. 16Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 34, 196. 17See David Walker, Anxious Nation. Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999), 127–135. 18Willis, 85. In 1904, fees for Melbourne University Medical School were £184 excluding books, at a time when the average yearly wage in manufacturing was £91. 19Willis, 55; Pensabene, 57. 20Willis, 60; Diana Dyason, ‘The medical profession in colonial Victoria 1834–1901’ in Disease, Medicine, and Empire. Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, eds Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 196–7; Pensabene, 70–1. 21Beaney, 33–4. 22Basil J. Adam, ‘A Method of Dealing with Incurable Strictures of the Urethra,’ AMG (20 June 1896): 228. 23Martin, 485–501. 24W. Balls-Headley, The Evolution of the Diseases of Women (London: Smith Elder & Co,1894): 2. On Balls-Headley, see Magarey, 86–90. 25Beaney, 55; Dr M. Lafayette Byrn, The Book of Nature: A Full and Explicit Explanation of all that can or ought to be known of the Structure and Uses of The Organs of Life and Generation in Man and Woman (Sydney: The Modern Medical Publishing Company, 1890?), 90. See also Anne-Maree Collins, ‘Woman or Beast? Bestiality in Queensland, 1870–1949’, Hecate 17, issue 1 (1991): 40. 26George M. Beard, The New Cyclopedia of Family Medicine. Our Home Physician: A popular guide. Sydney: McNeil and Coffee, 1885, p. 885. Though Beard is from the United States, I have included his work here as it was published in Sydney, and hence readily available and widely read in New South Wales. 27John William Springthorpe, ‘On the Psychological Aspect of the Sexual Appetite’, Australasian Medical Gazette (AMG) (October 1884): 11–13; Byrn, 90; Beaney, 184; Fullerton, 147; Beard, 885. 28Discussion after Springthorpe's paper at the Victorian Branch of the BMA, recorded in Springthorpe, 13. 29Magarey, 98–111. 30On debates over the importance of Acton to Victorian medicine, see Ivan Crozier, ‘William Acton and the history of sexuality: the medical and professional context’, Journal of Victorian Culture 5 (2000): 1–27; On Acton's influence in Australia, see Robert Darby, ‘William Acton's Antipodean Disciplines A Colonial Perspective on His Theories of Male Sexual (Dys)Function’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 2 (April 2004): 157–82. 31Lesley A. Hall, Hidden Anxieties: male sexuality, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 17. See William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life (London; JA Churchill, 1871), 28, 60, 92–104. 32Lesley A. Hall, Hidden Anxieties: male sexuality, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 17. See William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life (London; JA Churchill, 1871), 28, 60,, 10–4. 33Beaney, 27; Beard, 888. 34Beaney, 138. See also W. B. Towle, The Sexual System in Health and Disease, 11th ed (Sydney, no publisher, nd, 1898?), 132. 35James George Beaney, Spermatorrhoea in its Physiological, Medical and Legal Aspects (Melbourne: Walker May and Co, 1870): 35. 36On Springthorpe, see Stephen Garton, ‘The scales of suffering: love, death and Victorian masculinity’, Social History 27, no. 1 (January 2002). 37Springthorpe, 11–3; J. W. Springthorpe, ‘Presidential Address: The Teaching of Science in Matters of Health’, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Brisbane 1895, Section 1’, Pamphlet 105 ML 042/P100, 9. 38W. M. Chisholm, ‘A case of villous tumour of the bladder’, AMG (December 1885): 63. See also RA Stirling, ‘Notes on some of the rarer complications of gonorrhoea’, AMG (February 1888): 115. 39W. M. Chisholm, ‘A case of villous tumour of the bladder’, AMG (December 1885): 63. See also RA Stirling, ‘Notes on some of the rarer complications of gonorrhoea’, AMG (February 1888): 11. 40W. M. Chisholm, ‘A case of villous tumour of the bladder’, AMG (December 1885): 63. See also RA Stirling, ‘Notes on some of the rarer complications of gonorrhoea’, AMG (February 1888): 11. 41W. M. Chisholm, ‘A case of villous tumour of the bladder’, AMG (December 1885): 63. See also RA Stirling, ‘Notes on some of the rarer complications of gonorrhoea’, AMG (February 1888): 10. 42W. M. Chisholm, ‘A case of villous tumour of the bladder’, AMG (December 1885): 63. See also RA Stirling, ‘Notes on some of the rarer complications of gonorrhoea’, AMG (February 1888): 10. 43David F. Greenberg. The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 361; Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 133–70 44On the “othering” of sexed working class bodies, see Kate Gleeson, ‘From Centenary to the Olympics, Gang Rape in Sydney’, Current Issues in Criminal Issues in Criminal Justice 16, vol. 2 (November 2004): 183–201. 45George L. Mosse, The image of man: the creation of modern masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 86. 46Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1990), 38–58; Mosse, 94–5. 47Dr Paul Ward Farmer, Three Weeks in the Kew Lunatic Asylum (Melbourne: John J. Halligan, 1900), 24; Havelock Ellis, ‘Preface to the First Edition’ (1901) Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: FA Davis Company, 1913, 2nd ed), p. v. 48Byrn, 44; Even in the large volume of medical sexuality, Dr James Beaney's The Generative Organs, there is only the barest mention of male homosexuality, while female homosexuality and hermaphrodism were more fully covered. This appears to be in contrast to much sexology literature, where as Nye suggests, the ‘invert … was nearly always a male’. See Beaney, The Generative Organs, 381–2; and Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France (New York: Oxford, 1993), 114. 49Mosse, 79. 50See Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victorian Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995), 127–8, 140–1; Lucy Chesser, ‘Cross Dressing, Sexual (Mis)Representation and Homosexual Desire, 1863–1893’, in Australia's Homosexual Histories: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, eds David L. Phillips and Graham Willett (Sydney: The University of Sydney, 2000), 10–1; Adam Carr, ‘Policing the “Abominable Crime” in Nineteenth Century Victoria’, in Australia's Homosexual Histories: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, eds David L. Phillips and Graham Willett (Sydney: The University of Sydney, 2000), 30; see also Clive Moore, ‘That Abominable Crime: First Steps Towards a Social History of Male Homosexuals in Colonial Queensland, 1859–1900’, in Gay Perspectives II: More Essays in Australian Gay Culture, ed. Robert Aldrich (Sydney: The University of Sydney, 1993): 115–48. 51Greenberg, 397–433; Jennifer Tilly, ‘Anxious Slippages Between “Us” and “Them”: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies’, in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Eds Jennifer Tilly and Jaqueline Urban (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 129. For an alternative view, see Joseph Bristow, ‘Remapping the Sites of Modern Gay History: Legal Reform, Medico-Legal Thought, Homosexual Scandal, Erotic Geography’, Journal of British Studies 46 (January 2007): 116–42. 52Australia produced no specialist sexologist until Norman Haire in the twentieth century: most of the key sexologists forming theories on homosexuality and other perceived deviancies were British, Continental or American. 53Bavin-Mizzi, 131; 135. 54See amongst others Craig Johnston and Robert Johnston, ‘The Making of Homosexual Men’, in Staining the Wattle: A People's History of Australia since 1788, eds Verity Bergmann and Jenny Lee (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble 1988) 90–1; Robert Aldrich, ‘Gay and Lesbian History’, in Gay Life and Culture: A World History, ed Robert Aldrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 19–20; Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 218–20. 55Springthorpe, ‘On the Psychological Aspect’, 9. 56Johnston and Johnston, 88; Murrie, 68–77, Moore, ‘The Frontier’, 25–30; Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, 240–1. 57On Ward and masculinity, see Lisa Featherstone, ‘Sex and The Australian Legend: masculinity and the white man's body’ in Russel Ward: Reflections on a Legend. Bongiorno, Frank and Roberts, David Andrew (eds), Special Edition of Journal of Australian Colonial History, v.10, no. 2, 2008, pp. 73–90. 58On the demographic imbalance see Moore, ‘Colonial Manhood’, 37–41. 59Vern L. Bullough, Sexual variance in society and history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 642; H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr, ‘The diseases of masturbation: values and the concept of disease’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974): 234–48. 60Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America’, American Quarterly xxv (May 1973): 134. 61As McLaren notes, the Church had long held masturbation to be a pollution, but they had been less concerned with the physical effects. Medicine consolidated these anxieties. See Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 139. See also Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Doctor, Patient and Onanist Disease in the Nineteenth Century’. Journal of the History of Medicine, XXX (1), January 1975, 217–34. 62Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 124. 63Beaney, The Generative System, 108; John Hern, Advanced Hygiene: or How to Cure Disease Without Recourse to Drugs or Medicines of Any Kind (Melbourne: Mason, Firth, and M'Cutcheon General Printers, 1892): 157. See also Fullerton, 146; Hern, 158. 64Fullerton, 146. 65Towle, 4, 5. 66Fullerton, 145. 67Towle, 5, 7, 15. 68V. Marano, ‘On Neurasthenia’, AMG (October 1890): 22; Fullerton, 145. 69Harvey Nickoll, ‘Varicocele in Scrotum’, AMG (15 February 1895): 50; Fullerton, 145. 70Towle, 12. 71W. F. Quaife, ‘Tinnitus connected with Onanism’, AMG (20 January 1896): 20. 72Towle, 7. 73Dr Frederic Norton Manning, ‘A Disputed Case of Insanity’, AMG (June 1882): 119–20. 74J. W. Springthorpe, ‘Some instances of hysteria’, AMG (20 July 1897): 314. 75F. Norton Manning, ‘A contribution to the study of hereditary’, AMG (August 1885): 264. 76Marano, 22. 77Beaney, 21; Walker, ‘Continence’ 2; Darby, 284. 78Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, ‘Body doubles: the spermatorrhea panic’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 3 (2002): 356–7, 375; Darby, ‘Pathologising Male Sexuality’, 284; Elizabeth Stephens, ‘Pathologizing leaky male bodies: spermatorrhea in nineteenth-century British medicine and popular anatomical museums’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17, no. 3 (2008): 421–38. 79Beaney, Spermatorrhoea, 12. See also Beaney, The Generative System, 27. 80Byrn, 88. 81Beaney, Spermatorrhoea, 57–62. 82Springthorpe, ‘On the Psychological Aspect’, 11. 83Ben Barker-Benfield, ‘The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of sexuality’, Feminist Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 1972): 45–74; Greemberg, 360–5; Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 278–302. 84Walker, ‘Continence’, 1–14. 85Walker, ‘Continence’, 2. See also Beaney, Spermatorrhoea, which described young men desperately afraid that they had permanently damaged their bodies through masturbation, 75–83; Rezin Thompson MD, The Medical Adviser: Full and Plain Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Medicine especially adapted to Family Use (Melbourne: Standard Publishing Company, 1884): 410; Editorial, ‘Sex hygiene and venereal disease’, AMG (9 May 1914): 415. 86See examples from case notes in Garton, Madness and Medicine, 124; Beaney, Spermatorrhoea, 92–3; Clifford Albutt, ‘Neurasthenia’, AMG (17 February 1912): 151; Richard Arthur, ‘Psycho-Therapeutics’, AMG (30 November 1912): 553. 87Fullerton, 147. 88Fullerton, 147. 89HGH Naylor, ‘A Plea for Early Circumcision’, AMG (20 June 1901): 239. Fullerton also recommended circumcision for the suppression of urine, and for some cases of venereal disease, 140. 90Beaney, The Generative Organs, 252. 91Byrn, 59; Laqueur, 267. 92Beaney, The Generative System, 156. 93Beaney, The Generative System,, 156. 94Beaney, The Generative System,, 157–8. 95Springthorpe, ‘On the Psychological Aspect’, 11. 96cited in Towle, 24