German-Austrian psychiatrist who wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) — the first systematic scientific classification of sexual disorders — coining the terms sadism, masochism, and fetishism, and establishing sexology as a medical discipline.
Created the medical-scientific framework for the study of sexuality — by classifying sexual behaviors as 'perversions' requiring medical treatment, Krafft-Ebing made sexuality a legitimate object of scientific study while simultaneously pathologizing non-normative sexuality — a double legacy that shaped the 20th century.
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