“I have nothing more to tell you, dear doctor”: A Gay Man’s Intimate Confession to Emile Zola

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Notes

^1. Alexandre Lacassagne (1843–1924) is not a name familiar to historians of medicine yet was an early criminologist who ought to be better known. He encouraged criminals serving sentences at St Paul’s prison in Lyon, where he was the prison physician, to write their autobiographies, guided their writing and relied on their confessional texts to appeal for more lenient sentences to the authorities. The ethics of his practice deserves further study for the manifold ways it fed into late nineteenth-century criminological forensic medicine. Saint-Paul was fired up by Lacassagne’s research with these “criminals” (pimps, prostitutes, homosexuals, etc.) and decided to pursue a doctoral dissertation focused on the use of “interior language” in their autobiographies. Lacassagne was the type of early criminologist Michel Foucault would have found to be gold dust.

^2. Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 34.

^3. American sexologist David Oliver Cauldwell used the term transsexual in his essay “Psychopathia Transexualis” (1949) to describe individuals whose sex assigned at birth was different from their gender identity. His own “confessions” published as The Diary of a Sexologist: Intimate Observations and Experiences Revealed When a Doctor Tells His Story (1949) would make an illuminating study in contrast to the Italian’s.

^4. Hirschfeld’s Institute opened in Berlin in July 1919 during the Weimar Republic and offered surgical transformation to transsexual types.

^5. Published in successive instalments in 1894–95 in the Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, de Médecine Légale et de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique.

^6. Thomson describes Saint-Paul’s thesis in The Italian Invert, 156–60.

^7. An eloquent analysis of what is involved in asking this question is found in LeVay’s Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why.

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George Rousseau

George Rousseau is professor emeritus at Oxford University and a cultural historian who has written widely on matters relating medicine and literature to other disciplines. His last two books are Rachmaninoff’s Cape: A Nostalgia Memoir (London, 2015), and Light Sleep: Life from McCarthy to Covid (London, 2022).