Tom Holland

Why is Jack the Ripper doing what he is doing?

And it has to be said that there are a few people in London, those who are abreast of the latest scientific thinking that is emerging at this time in Germany.

who are aware of perhaps a possible explanation for what Jack the Ripper is doing.

And this is the fruit of a revolutionary development in the study of psychopathology, as it is called.

The study of psychopaths, if you want to call it like that.

Correct.

And by mentioning the Marquis de Sade, which he does in that same article where he also mentioned the Ripper as being a kind of Mr. Hyde figure, he's drawing on the work of one of the most distinguished representatives of this kind of new generation of pioneering psychiatrists that's emerged in Germany.

This is a guy we talked about in relation to Oscar Wilde and the notion of homosexuality and heterosexuality.

And it's a German called Richard von Kraft Ebbing.

And Kraft Ebbing and his colleagues in Germany have begun to look at human sexuality as an expression of evolution.

and to explore it as a subject of scientific study.

So rather than being something that should be judged in moral terms, you look and try and explain it in medical terms, in psychiatric terms.

And Krafft-Ebbing's own specialization was what he called pathological fetishism.

So essentially kind of deviances from what he defined as the sexual norm.

And in 1886, so only two years before Jack the Ripper, he published a vast compendium of basically sexual deviancy, sexual morbidities, he called it.

Psychopathia sexualis.

And people are very titillated by this.

It becomes very, very famous, which is presumably how Stead would have come across it even before it ends up being translated into English in 1892.

And it gives to the English language all kinds of words that we today, I think, take for granted.

So homosexuality is one, heterosexuality is another.