Preface
This project started as a search for something else. I had been researching the medicalization of homosexuality in post-World War II America last summer. What I sought was psychiatric case studies; I wanted to analyze these in order to reclaim the lives of those who suffered treatment. I wanted to understand how and why people sought treatment for their “homosexuality” and what this treatment actually entailed. I was looking for a way to illuminate the mode and meanings of the medical project to “cure” same-sex desire and the wider project to eliminate the “homosexual.” Implicit in my proposed analysis was an attempt to explore how medicine regulated the ways in which all of us conceive “sexuality” in the latter half of our century. Accomplishing all of this was much more difficult than I imagined.
Cases studies that involved the treatment of homosexuality are among the most difficult medical records to find. The major reason for this is legal. Most hospitals will only release their records to physicians, certainly not to undergraduates. Psychiatric records are kept confidential under the law. Records of “homosexuals” are even more veiled in secrecy. I have been told by experts in this type of research that finding such cases would be nearly impossible even if I had access. For obvious reasons, psychiatric records are not arranged by subject. Faced with this reasonably understandable form of academic censorship, I decided that it would be better to start research of this kind when I became a physician myself.
Faced with these difficulties, I changed the direction of my research. I wanted to study a particular physician who did sexological research -- someone who was renown in medical circles but still relatively unresearched. To do this I turned to the medical history archive of the Harvard University Medical School. The archivist there directed me to the Robert L. Dickinson papers. Looking through the collection of papers, notes, and drawings I realized that I had found a wealth of material that lent itself to the type of analysis in which I was interested. My search had ended, and this project began.
Robert L. Dickinson’s work has largely gone unnoticed by scholars interested in gay, lesbian, and gender studies. Most of the focus has been on the late nineteenth-century European sexologists which came before him, men such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis. If not focusing on the early sexologists, scholarship has been directed toward the studies of those that came after Dickinson, principally the studies of Kinsey of the 1940s and 1950s or Masters and Johnson’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. What I am suggesting here is that Dickinson had an important role in the development of sexology in America. He was the first American sexologist. For that reason alone, Dickinson’s work is important.
It is hard to speculate why Dickinson has been ignored. Two reasons for his exclusion from history come to mind: his work stayed mostly within the medical community, it did not receive the same attention in the wider culture as other medical experts. Secondly, he has not been studied because his work deals with women. Women’s issues have been understudied in gay and lesbian scholarship; the stress has been on gay studies, not lesbian studies. This is not a question I seek to resolve in this project. In some small way, I am trying to rectify this omission.
In what follows, I want to remedy the lack of scholarly interest in Dickinson by giving the first introduction to his sexological works. Underpinning my exploration of Dickinson’s life in research is a belief that the agendas of queer studies and gender studies are linked. It is impossible to conceive of sexuality without thinking of gender. Scholarship which questions the meaning of “sexuality” should necessarily focus on gender as well. Accordingly, in figuring gender we must understand the place of sexuality. We have not yet reached the point were desire is only understood based on the gender of its object. I am not sure if this time will ever occur, but until it does, it is important for feminists and those who stand against homophobia to work together. In my reading of Dickinson, I am trying to draw these connections.
Matthew DeGennaro, May 1996
Cases studies that involved the treatment of homosexuality are among the most difficult medical records to find. The major reason for this is legal. Most hospitals will only release their records to physicians, certainly not to undergraduates. Psychiatric records are kept confidential under the law. Records of “homosexuals” are even more veiled in secrecy. I have been told by experts in this type of research that finding such cases would be nearly impossible even if I had access. For obvious reasons, psychiatric records are not arranged by subject. Faced with this reasonably understandable form of academic censorship, I decided that it would be better to start research of this kind when I became a physician myself.
Faced with these difficulties, I changed the direction of my research. I wanted to study a particular physician who did sexological research -- someone who was renown in medical circles but still relatively unresearched. To do this I turned to the medical history archive of the Harvard University Medical School. The archivist there directed me to the Robert L. Dickinson papers. Looking through the collection of papers, notes, and drawings I realized that I had found a wealth of material that lent itself to the type of analysis in which I was interested. My search had ended, and this project began.
Robert L. Dickinson’s work has largely gone unnoticed by scholars interested in gay, lesbian, and gender studies. Most of the focus has been on the late nineteenth-century European sexologists which came before him, men such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis. If not focusing on the early sexologists, scholarship has been directed toward the studies of those that came after Dickinson, principally the studies of Kinsey of the 1940s and 1950s or Masters and Johnson’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. What I am suggesting here is that Dickinson had an important role in the development of sexology in America. He was the first American sexologist. For that reason alone, Dickinson’s work is important.
It is hard to speculate why Dickinson has been ignored. Two reasons for his exclusion from history come to mind: his work stayed mostly within the medical community, it did not receive the same attention in the wider culture as other medical experts. Secondly, he has not been studied because his work deals with women. Women’s issues have been understudied in gay and lesbian scholarship; the stress has been on gay studies, not lesbian studies. This is not a question I seek to resolve in this project. In some small way, I am trying to rectify this omission.
In what follows, I want to remedy the lack of scholarly interest in Dickinson by giving the first introduction to his sexological works. Underpinning my exploration of Dickinson’s life in research is a belief that the agendas of queer studies and gender studies are linked. It is impossible to conceive of sexuality without thinking of gender. Scholarship which questions the meaning of “sexuality” should necessarily focus on gender as well. Accordingly, in figuring gender we must understand the place of sexuality. We have not yet reached the point were desire is only understood based on the gender of its object. I am not sure if this time will ever occur, but until it does, it is important for feminists and those who stand against homophobia to work together. In my reading of Dickinson, I am trying to draw these connections.
Matthew DeGennaro, May 1996
posted by Matthew at 8:08 PM
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