“Sexual Development”: Timing Puberty in German Enlightenment Medicine (1778–99)

Abstract

From the mid-eighteenth century onward, French vitalists started to re-theorize the bodily clock of maturation. Archaic notions of precocity as an ill omen and ancient constructions of sexual timing as ethnic markers now acquired an increasingly physiological profile. Regulatory conceptions of sexual and psychosexual “development” widely animated German literature in the closing decades of the century. Here is evidence of new interdisciplinary problematizations of pubescence ( Mannbarkeit) as the coordination in time of the mental apparatus ( Seele, Character) and the sex drive ( Geschlechtstrieb). New developmental-physiological frames for sexual maturity and psychosexuality readily extended to the fate of Nationalcharacter, sponsoring various roundtables concerning etiological questions.