Havelock Ellis

Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was an English physician, essayist and pioneer of the scientific study of sexuality. After an adolescence partly spent teaching in the Australian bush he qualified in medicine in London but practiced little, turning to literature as editor of the Mermaid series of Elizabethan dramatists and the Contemporary Science series. Sexual Inversion, written with John Addington Symonds, was prosecuted as obscene in 1898; it became part of the seven volumes of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, published between 1897 and 1928, which treated homosexuality, modesty, auto-erotism and the sexual impulse with a calm that was new.