"Sexual Development": Timing Puberty in German Enlightenment Medicine (1778-99).

From the mid-eighteenth century onward, French vitalists started to re-theorize the bodily clock of maturation. Archaic notions of precocity as an ill omen and ancient constructions of sexual timing as ethnic markers now acquired an increasingly physiological profile. Regulatory conceptions of sexual and psychosexual "development" widely animated German literature in the closing decades of the century. Here is evidence of new interdisciplinary problematizations of pubescence (Mannbarkeit) as the coordination in time of the mental apparatus (Seele, Character) and the sex drive (Geschlechtstrieb). New developmental-physiological frames for sexual maturity and psychosexuality readily extended to the fate of Nationalcharacter, sponsoring various roundtables concerning etiological questions.

À partir du milieu du XVIIIe siècle, les vitalistes français ont commencé à théoriser à nouveau l'horloge corporelle de la maturation. Les représentations archaïques de la précocité, considérée comme un mauvais présage, et les anciennes constructions du calendrier sexuel, perçues sous l'angle des marqueurs ethniques, ont acquis un profil de plus en plus physiologique. De fait, les conceptions réglementaires du « développement ¼ sexuel et psychosexuel ont largement animé la littérature allemande au cours des dernières décennies du XVIIIe siècle. On y trouve des preuves de nouvelles problématisations interdisciplinaires de la puberté (Mannbarkeit) en tant que coordination dans le temps de l'appareil mental (Seele, Character) et de la libido (Geschlechtstrieb). Les nouveaux cadres développementaux et physiologiques de la maturité sexuelle et de la psychosexualité ont également influencé le Nationalcharacter, qui a parrainé diverses tables rondes sur les questions étiologiques.

Dhat Syndrome East and West: A History in Two Acts.

The intriguing story of dhat syndrome is that of medical modernity (psychiatry, clinical sexology) declaring medical premodernity (Ayurvedic concepts of semen loss) as its object. The early history and prehistory of this "culture-bound" diagnosis help understanding it as a dynamic confrontation of local, shifting knowledges. For instance, semen loss anxiety was an established motif both in European early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and again in several Indian psychodynamic texts of the 1960s. Moreover, it became problematically tied to notions of "Indian character". Little realized is that European venereologists were dealing with much comparable clinical presentations since the late eighteenth century, often resolving them in strikingly similar ways. For centuries, European proto-endocrinological ideas tied masculinity to the absorption and recirculation of semen, informing popular conceptions of "semen loss" (spermatorrhea) much comparable to those driven by dhatu physiology, dovetailing in colonial-era medicine. Expressive of growing controversy concerning this physiology after the mid-eighteenth century, a leitmotif of exaggerated fears tied to both "quacks" and proselytizing leading authorities such as Tissot and Lallemand, informed diagnoses of "tabes imaginaria", "spermatophobia", and "imaginary spermatorrhea."

Proto-Endocrinological Theories of Masculinity/Femininity (1490-1904).

From the mid-seventeenth century, resorption of a testicular "ferment" and resorption of some part of the semen constituted reputable accounts of secondary sexual characteristics. Only in the early twentieth century was the latter, "recrementitious secretion" theory, explicitly considered superseded by one of internal secretion, an advance ushering in the hormone era. A reconstruction of these proto-endocrinological concepts is offered onward from the first, 1490 print edition of Galen's On Semen. Early modern physicians picking up from Galen deliberated widely on the medium and pathway of male and female testicular influences on "the entire body," including the mind, causing "femininity" and "masculinity" in physical, mental-temperamental, and behavioral terms. A switch is discernible from "heat and strength" (Galen) to blood-borne "virility" or testicular vapor (such as proposed in 1564 by Tomás Rodrigues da Veiga), to iatrochemical postulations of a "seminal ferment" (suggested in the late 1650s, perhaps independently, by Thomas Willis at Oxford and Lambert van Velthuysen in Utrecht), finally to a "seminal recrement" or "reabsorbed semen" concept soon after (emergent in the posthumous work of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, among others). During the late eighteenth century, mounting controversy surrounded both the very idea of that concept and the involved anatomical pathways, informed by multiple experiments.

Developing Sex: From Recremental Semen to Developmental Endocrinology.

During the 1890s, animal development became associated with glandular activity, with profound implications for pediatric nosology and treatment. The significance of this endocrinological turn of developmental physiology and pathophysiology in part hinges on an often-overlooked continuity with ubiquitous early modern medical thought concerning semen as a recrementitious (reabsorbed) nutrient or stimulant. Mid-19th-century interests in adult sexual physiology were increasingly nerve-centered and antihumoral. Scattered empirical, particularly veterinarian, interests in gonadal developmental functions failed to moderate these explanatory trends. While Brown-Séquard's rejuvenation experiments still offered no clear starting point for a developmental endocrinology, in 1892 Gaston Variot and Paul Bezançon more explicitly deduced a testicular developmental endocrinological function from various observations on testicular ectopy and a local form of animal "demi-castration." Ensuing interest in the thyroid, the thymus and in the testicles led to various working conceptions of their respective and putatively reciprocal developmental properties, including the idea of a thyroid-testis axis. From 1896, the pubertal affliction of chlorosis became the subject of multiple opotherapeutic approaches, providing an experimental basis for theories of ovarian internal secretion. Polyglandular therapy, piloted for divergent developmental conditions, remained routine until the 1930s despite the biological inefficacy of many endocrine products.

Endocrinology's early historians (1889-1914) and the forgotten prehistory of testosterone.

INTRODUCTION: An often-retold historical outline of endocrinology was established over a century ago. An exhaustive history of sexual physiology remains forthcoming, however. OBJECTIVES: To explore and contextualize the remarkable medical-historical and medical-anthropologic frenzy triggered by Brown-Séquard's 1889 self-injections with testicular juice, which ultimately settled down into an early history of endocrinology. METHODS: Pertinent primary sources were selected from a broader study, primarily between 1889 and 1914, as well as selected older texts identified and unidentified by these sources. RESULTS: Endocrinology's early historians in a short space of time moved from the history of testicular opotherapy to that of glandular typology and physiology and to increasingly encompassing medical-historical accounts of internal secretion as an epochal idea. Early historians nominated "precursors" to Brown-Séquard but underestimated physiologic continuities-specifically, early modern protoendocrinologic notions concerning semen as a "recrement," notions still recited by Brown-Séquard and early Brown-Séquardists as well their detractors. Brown-Séquard himself worked through this old (recremental) concept of semen between 1889 and 1892 but was later identified with it, by among others Ancel and Bouin. CONCLUSION: Western sexual physiology is a medical palimpsest, the undertexts of which remain to be studied in detail.

Monosexual/Plurisexual: A Concise History.

Monosexuality and bisexuality (attraction to one and more than one gender/sex, respectively) are historical constructs, as are monomodal (e.g., gender/sex-based) and multimodal concepts of erotic attraction. I provide a brief outline of distinctions between single-gender and multi-gender attractions as they emerged in continental Europe. Nineteenth-century conceptualizations of sexual orientation in terms of gender-exclusivity were animated by medical frames for socio-sexual disfavor and aversion. From the early 1880s bisexuality became framed as a stage of "sexual inversion," and, from 1891, associated with notions of gender-independent attraction to particular "types." German and Dutch surveys reported in 1904 were pivotal in popularizing and internationalizing bisexual interest as a sexological intrigue.

Naming psychiatry: apropos earliest use of the term by Karl Friedrich Burdach (1800).

The term psychiatry (Psychiatrie) was first used in 1800, in the early work of Leipzig Romantic natural philosopher and later neuroanatomist Karl Friedrich Burdach; it was a recherché reference to medical animism. This little-known instance of neologism by a young ambitious author invites a brief lexicological study of psychiatry as a specialty in search of its place among the medical specialties, methods and applications. The European historical lexicology of psychiatry recalls the philosophical commentary tradition on Aristotle's De Anima, eventually (c. 1525) honoured with the mononym psychologia. The battle for the soul's science was superseded by the increasingly diverse theoretical, empirical, forensic and literary-humanitarian interests in mental medicine during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Venae spermaticae post aures: The early modern angiology-neurology of virility.

The famous discussion of Scythian cross-dressers in Hippocrates' Airs Waters Places (Aer.) 22 puzzled perhaps most medieval and Renaissance medical authorities. The text wrestled with a pre-Hippocratic, encephalocentric theory of spermatogenesis. Modern reception of the convoluted hypothesis put forward here gradually distilled three etiologies of failing virility: impotence, subfertility, and unmanliness. A gradual shift is discernable from increasingly Galenic neuro-andrological theories (sixteenth century) to neuropsychiatric (late-seventeenth through eighteenth century), phrenological and psychopathological (early- and late-nineteenth century), and finally early psycho-endocrinological (early-twentieth century) ideas about masculinity. Aer. 22 was a ubiquitously recurring reference across all of these episodes, indeed well beyond medicine, rendering it a highly sensitive index of change in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric thinking. The pre-Enlightenment, neurology-centric onset of this extended modern history of sexual/gender medicine is briefly discussed, as well as its phrenological afterlife.

Pediatrics: Naming a Medical Specialty (1721-1880).

The specialty-establishing term pediatrics entered Anglophone medicine via the German and French, and ultimately goes back to neoclassical Latin from Greek roots. The term reflects the largely nineteenth-century bifurcation of the early modern discipline of midwifery, into what came to be called gynecology and pediatrics. Contra previous contributions to etymology, cognates of the term were in some extended use in continental Europe well before they entered Anglophone medical lexica (in 1839) and Anglophone medical literature proper (from circa 1851). William Hughes Willshire (1816-1899) may be recognized as the earliest, and for some time only, prolific user of the English cognate.

A familiar species of Crank: Anti-Vaccinationists in medical history.

Vaccination, health psychology and mental health make for three well-established and prestigious topoi in medical history. An in-depth look at their historical intersections remains forthcoming, however. Vaccinology's psychological turns merit historians' attention, all the more in the light of more recent, post-psychological and infodemiological, perspectives in vaccine acceptance research. Historiography at this point may help appreciating the present, and future, standing of psychological profiling in terms of its explanatory merits and policy uses. Of specific, critical interest is the motif of mental illness historically shared by vaccine advocates and contrarians. Mock-psychiatric nosology was a favored framing device for vaccination polemicists early on, indeed before vaccines were called vaccines and before psychiatry came to be called psychiatry. Though long anticipated, substantive historical-sociological and empirical approaches to vaccine non-acceptance were seen only from the 1920s and 1930s, respectively. Today, spirited animosity over vaccination continues to invite both professional and public debate about the founding concepts, the basic tenets, and the defining boundaries, of the mental health sciences.

From Pathognomicha and Passiologia to Pathologia: concise history of a neologism (1486-1598).

The etymology of the term pathology refers to one to the various ancient (Hippocratic, Galenic and Pseudo-Galenic) suggestions for subdividing the medical arts (medicinae artis partes), suggestions that came into print during the late fifteenth century. Multiple variants of the term initially served to denote "pathology". Jacques Dubois's reading list for medical students, first published circa 1535, ultimately popularized neo-Latin pathologia; it entered the English language, via the French, in 1597.

American Proctology Before 1899, Part 2: The Rise of the Rectal Specialists.

Joseph M. Mathews' study at St. Mark's Hospital (London) in the 1877 to 1878 winter was followed shortly by a landmark move toward specialization in the United States: Mathews' heading of a Special Commission on Rectal Diseases appointed at the 23rd Annual Session of the Kentucky State Medical Society, held April 2 to 4, 1878. Various "rectal specialists," under various makeshift titles, were lecturing and publishing by the mid-1890s. The world's first proctologic journal, published between 1894 and 1898, was Mathews' Medical Quarterly, from its inception interpellating a community of colleagues.

Gastroenterology: Naming a discipline.

Gastroenterology consolidated into a medical specialty toward the end of the nineteenth century, a development, however, long anticipated by medical terminology. The undefined neologisms gastridiologia and enterologia appear in the preface to a Latin work of medical aphorisms, dated 30 September 1655, by Erfurt physician Valentin Andreas Möllenbrock (1623-1675). Boerhaave and Cheselden used enterologia as an anatomical term from roughly the same date (1711); it is unclear who may have influenced whom. Hepatologie/hepatologia and hepatographie/hepatographia were coined in Tarin's 1753 Dictionnaire anatomique, to denote putative anatomical sub-disciplines.

The St. Louis Electric Ambulance Car (1893-1895).

The world's first electric ambulance was the St. Louis electric ambulance car, developed in 1893, put in service on December 27, 1894, and cancelled because of funding shortages in mid-1895. Its history is briefly reconstructed, and its legacy appreciated.

American Proctology Before 1899, Part 1: "Shoals of Quacks"-The Itinerant Pile Doctor.

The early history of the American medical specialty of proctology before the 1899 establishment of the American Proctologic Society was animated by an extensive scene of itinerant pile doctors, from at least as far back as 1871. It was inspired by the initially proprietary carbolic acid injection treatment of hemorrhoids credited to Milton W. Mitchell (1833?-1887), long known only from oral history. Expanded entrepreneurial approaches seen in the 1880s are exemplified by the work of the initial exploiters of Mitchell's method, Alexander William Brinkerhoff (1821-1887) and son, and a mid-1920s recommercialization of "ambulant proctology" by its ambassador Charles Elton Blanchard.

Homosexual/Heterosexual: First Print Uses of the Terms by Daniel von Kászony (1868-1871).

Printed use of the term heterosexuality, as juxtaposed to homosexuality, may be dated to 1871. The German noun pairs Heterosexualität/Homosexualität and adjective pair heterosexuelle/homosexuelle, appeared in two 1871 nonfiction works by hack writer Daniel von Kászony (1813-1886), picking up on Károly Mária Kertbeny's terminology. Kertbeny juxtaposed heterosexual-homosexual in 1868 correspondence but refrained from using the former term in his two famed 1869 open letters to repeal Prussian anti-sodomy legislation. Printed use of the term homosexual may be dated to 1868 or early 1869, by a pseudonymous author that is almost certainly Kászony.