Sex and the Doctors: the Medicalization of Sexuality as a Two-way Process in Early to Mid-Twentieth-century Britain

Abstract

Historians of sexology, the scientific study of sexuality, argue that from the 1890s sex researchers and activists formed a symbiosis with medicine, bringing sex under the new medical gaze and making sexology respectable.1 They suggest that the medicalization of sexuality was an expression of the power that medicine, the state or patriarchy, supposedly had or perhaps an element of control that hegemonic forces were extending. Sexological change is said to have been imposed from above (on women or homosexuals) and resisted from below.2 There is little evidence of this in Britain. Sexual change came primarily from below, as a result of the responses of vast numbers of individuals to common circumstances and experiences. The normalization of sexo-logical ideas and the imposition of them upon some resistant groups followed rather than preceded the growth of desire for medicalized sexual knowledge. And a visitor to Britain in 1946 found that, far from lauding the scientific model of sexuality, ‘Doctors practising in sex are still unwilling to call themselves sexologists.’3