How the Medical Profession Waged War - and Made Profits - on Masturbation

The late nineteenth century sexology texts are a central element of what Foucault calls the "proliferation of discourse" about sexuality and sexual variance. Sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing catalogued typologies of sexuality, focusing on the deviances and perversions of what was fundamentally considered to be the healthy, normative sexuality of procreative coitus between a married man and woman. These texts emerged in European and American society at a time when medicine was being elevated as the great beacon of truth, replacing religion as the institution that wielded the power to define acts, personages, and conditions.