Tom Holland

There's also bisexuality, Kraft-Ebbing coins that, necrophilia, masochism.

And Psychopathia Sexualis also introduces to Victorian Britain the concept of the counterpart of masochism, which is what Kraft-Ebbing termed sadism.

So from the Marquis de Sade.

And it was framed by Kraft-Ebbing as an instinct, a sexual pathology that had always existed.

So he wrote, that lust and cruelty frequently occur together is a fact that has long been recognized and not infrequently observed.

And he defines the most sinister expression of this morbidity as being what he called lust murder.

And he defined it as lust potentiated as cruelty.

And it's not surprising, I think, that he ends up obsessed by Jack the Ripper.

And every time he revises the Psychopathia Sexualis, he includes ever more expansive descriptions of Jack the Ripper.

And the Ripper ends up listed in the chapter on lust murder as case 17.

And Kraft Ebbing writes about him, he does not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act.

So in other words, he's providing a motivation there.

And it may be true or not, but it is the kind of motivation that I think people in the 21st century, listening to true crime podcasts or whatever,

would recognize as something plausible in a way that I think most people in the 1880s wouldn't.

Yeah, I think that this ultimately is why Jack the Ripper is commemorated as the first serial killer in history, because it's not because he is the first person to commit kind of crimes like this.

I can't believe that.

It's because it's only in the 1880s that the motivations of murderers like Jack the Ripper first come to seem explicable by science, by psychiatry, by psychopathology.

Or indeed by top historians, Tom.

Or by top historians, yes.

That sets us up nicely for our final episode, Dominic, where we will be going through all the various lists of suspects that have been proposed, and we will be revealing the truth, won't we?