Havelock Ellis

English physician, essayist and social reformer (1859–1939) whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex was the first sustained attempt in English to treat sexuality as a subject of open inquiry rather than of law or of the confessional. He spent four years teaching in the Australian bush as a very young man, an isolation he later described as the origin of his vocation, then qualified in medicine in London chiefly in order to be allowed to write about the body without prosecution.

The first volume of the Studies, Sexual Inversion (1897), written with John Addington Symonds and published after Symonds's death, gathered case histories of homosexual men and women and argued that inversion is a congenital variation, neither a disease nor a vice — a position that led to the prosecution of its bookseller in 1898 and to the remaining volumes being printed in the United States and kept, for decades, behind the counters of medical libraries.

Across the seven volumes he took up auto-erotism, a term he coined, modesty, the periodicity of desire, sexual selection and what he called eonism, and it is from his vocabulary that narcissism entered psychology. He wrote as a collector of testimony rather than as a theorist, and both his method and his tolerance influenced Freud, who cited him, and later Kinsey. Man and Woman (1894), The Criminal (1890) and the essays of The Dance of Life show the same reformer's temper applied elsewhere.

Honesty about him requires the other half: like many progressives of his generation he was an active eugenicist and a vice-president of the Eugenics Education Society, and his writings on the improvement of the race belong to the same body of work as his defence of sexual freedom.