Iwan Bloch

Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) was a German physician, a specialist in skin and venereal diseases in Berlin, often described as the founder of sexology as a scientific discipline, for which he proposed the name Sexualwissenschaft. His survey The Sexual Life of Our Time (1907) treated sexuality as a matter of culture and history as well as medicine. He argued in The Origin of Syphilis that the disease had been brought to Europe from America. Under the pen name Eugen Dühren he wrote studies of the Marquis de Sade, and in 1904 he published the first edition of Sade's long-lost manuscript The 120 Days of Sodom.