HAVELOCK ELLIS, British physician, died (b. 1859); A British sexologist, physician, and social reformer, his Sexual Inversion, the first English medical text book on homosexuality, co-authored with John Addington Symonds, described the sexual relations of homosexual men and boys, something that Ellis did not consider to be a disease, immoral, or a crime.

The work assumes that same-sex love transcends age as well as gender taboos, as seven of the twenty-one examples are of inter-generational relationships. A bookseller was prosecuted in 1897 for stocking it. Although the term itself is attributed to Ellis, he writes in 1897, “‘Homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.” Other psychologically important concepts developed by Ellis include auto-eroticism and narcissism, both of which were later taken up by Sigmund Freud. Alas, he was also a proponent of eugenics.