imagination of the young student doctor James Thomas Paul, and he had maintained an interest – verging on the obsessional – in sodomy and sodomites ever since. There was, he found, precious little information on the topic, but what there was Dr Paul had read. There was Dr Taylor’s cautious and short section on the forensic aspects of sodomy in his book The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence . Then there was George Drysdale’s hugely popular The Elements of Social Science, or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion , first published in 1854 and running to no fewer than thirty-five editions, which was remarkably frank about the extent of sodomy in England, its causes and its cures.
Dr Paul’s most recent and highly prized acquisition was a copy of Professor Ambroise Tardieu’s Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs , first published in Paris in 1857 and running into many editions. It was an astonishing work of urban anthropology, a physiological and psychological primer in sodomy. It professed to be a textbook telling the police, the medical profession and the legislature everything they had ever wanted to know about sodomy and sodomites, and much more besides. In it, Tardieu made a series of sensational claims about how the signs of sodomy were forensically written upon the body, indelibly inscribed, especially upon the anus and upon the penis.
Now, for the first time in his career, Dr Paul was about to examine two real-life sodomites. Dr Paul did not know what – if anything – he would find. Perhaps there would be nothing. The anuses of these two young men might prove to be no different from the hundreds, nay thousands, he had examined during his medical career. And in all these thousands of anuses never once had he seen any signs of sodomy – though it was, it must be said, not for the want of looking.
It was true that on a few occasions – several occasions, in fact – he had examined the anuses of women who had been buggered or ‘abused by men’, as he carefully and cautiously phrased it, and he had even given evidence in some of these cases. Dr Paul knew very well, as did every doctor worthy of the name, that buggery between men and women was much more common than most people dared to imagine.
Many men thought that having anal sex with a woman protected them in some way from syphilis and gonorrhoea – contagions and contaminations indissolubly associated with the spasms and miasmas of the vagina and its secretions. And there was a persistent folk belief that buggery with a woman would even effect a cure for clap, any sort of clap. Anal intercourse with a woman might be considered by some a ‘special continental vice’, an imported speciality of the swarms of decadent French whores who had flooded into London in the past twenty years, but in reality it was a widespread practice – not just a convenient form of birth control, but also a pleasurable end in itself.
Of course, as Dr Paul knew only too well, buggering a woman was – on paper at least – a serious crime: ‘unnatural connexion with a woman’ was the way the charge was usually, euphemistically, phrased. But was it not woman’s ordained role in nature to be penetrated, to be a receptacle, for man? Anal sex was an unspoken part of that ordained role, unless, of course, there were special circumstances, like anal rape, which brought the crime to the attention of the police. Buggering a woman might be illegal, but the law more often than not turned a blind eye. Buggering a woman might be unnatural, but at least it was naturally unnatural – utterly unlike a man buggering another man or, God forbid, allowing himself to be buggered by a man. That was quite another order of crime, an unnaturally unnatural connexion, a crime, an outrage upon Nature and an affront to God, an inversion, a blaspheming of the divinely ordained order of things.
Male and female created He them .
O nly when he came to sum up his
Dr Paul’s most recent and highly prized acquisition was a copy of Professor Ambroise Tardieu’s Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs , first published in Paris in 1857 and running into many editions. It was an astonishing work of urban anthropology, a physiological and psychological primer in sodomy. It professed to be a textbook telling the police, the medical profession and the legislature everything they had ever wanted to know about sodomy and sodomites, and much more besides. In it, Tardieu made a series of sensational claims about how the signs of sodomy were forensically written upon the body, indelibly inscribed, especially upon the anus and upon the penis.
Now, for the first time in his career, Dr Paul was about to examine two real-life sodomites. Dr Paul did not know what – if anything – he would find. Perhaps there would be nothing. The anuses of these two young men might prove to be no different from the hundreds, nay thousands, he had examined during his medical career. And in all these thousands of anuses never once had he seen any signs of sodomy – though it was, it must be said, not for the want of looking.
It was true that on a few occasions – several occasions, in fact – he had examined the anuses of women who had been buggered or ‘abused by men’, as he carefully and cautiously phrased it, and he had even given evidence in some of these cases. Dr Paul knew very well, as did every doctor worthy of the name, that buggery between men and women was much more common than most people dared to imagine.
Many men thought that having anal sex with a woman protected them in some way from syphilis and gonorrhoea – contagions and contaminations indissolubly associated with the spasms and miasmas of the vagina and its secretions. And there was a persistent folk belief that buggery with a woman would even effect a cure for clap, any sort of clap. Anal intercourse with a woman might be considered by some a ‘special continental vice’, an imported speciality of the swarms of decadent French whores who had flooded into London in the past twenty years, but in reality it was a widespread practice – not just a convenient form of birth control, but also a pleasurable end in itself.
Of course, as Dr Paul knew only too well, buggering a woman was – on paper at least – a serious crime: ‘unnatural connexion with a woman’ was the way the charge was usually, euphemistically, phrased. But was it not woman’s ordained role in nature to be penetrated, to be a receptacle, for man? Anal sex was an unspoken part of that ordained role, unless, of course, there were special circumstances, like anal rape, which brought the crime to the attention of the police. Buggering a woman might be illegal, but the law more often than not turned a blind eye. Buggering a woman might be unnatural, but at least it was naturally unnatural – utterly unlike a man buggering another man or, God forbid, allowing himself to be buggered by a man. That was quite another order of crime, an unnaturally unnatural connexion, a crime, an outrage upon Nature and an affront to God, an inversion, a blaspheming of the divinely ordained order of things.
Male and female created He them .
O nly when he came to sum up his
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