Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/15



The following work was undertaken and completed several years ago, with the aim of offering to Anglo-Saxon readers, whether personally interested in the subject or not, a general but condensed survey, for popular information, of the problem of homosexualism, similisexualism, urningism, inverted sexuality, uranianism, as it is variously termed. There is no large summary of the sort in English for intelligent lay-readers, whose interest in the topic is widely a specially serious one, nor easy sources of information for persons quite unacquainted with its extremely important bearings—social, legislative, psycho-pathological, and so on. The distinctively medical, the psychiatric, observations, however numerous, are not predominantly in English; are not readily procurable by laymen; and largely are in languages not sufficiently familiar to Anglo-Saxons in their own countries to be helpfully circulated there. Many such are not studies of just the sort undertaken in this review.

The present book therefore essentially is one not written for active professional psychiaters, of any nationality. To such an aim it does not presume. It is addressed particularly to the individual layman, intelligently inclined to social sciences; whether he has has any immediate reason to study similisexuality, or none. If he have such personal reason, the book may be particularly useful to him. Physicians not familiar with contemporary German and other explorations and discussions of homosexualism as a mysterious instinct that is often ineradicable, enormously diffused, and of a