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Some reported a tendency for hypertrichosis in patients “of Jewish and Celtic extraction,” others in patients of Russian or Italian descent.51 Still others justified the exclusion of “negroes” from their studies of hair growth by insisting that a “deficiency of secondary hair is frequent in these people as compared to Caucasians.”52 Meanwhile, the fine amounts of facial hair on the “Mongolian, the American Indian and the Malay,” one specialist pointed out, might lead these peoples to find grotesque the prodigious quantity of hair “that is ordinarily found on the faces of Europeans.”53
Despite such diagnostic confusion, sorting normal from excessive hair became a pressing concern for late-nineteenth-century experts, who approached visible hair, particularly visible facial hair on women, as a crucial if often confusing marker of ill health. Post-Darwinian medical texts were rife with detailed classifying schema, designed to assist physicians in diagnosis. One dermatologist carefully delineated six types of hairy patients who might appear requesting treatment, from the woman with “a very fine white lanugo on the upper lip and sides of the cheeks” (which “is noticeable only to herself and should not be treated”), through the brunette with a short fine mustache (which “adds a certain artistic picture which is natural for that type of individual” and should also be left untreated), up to the patient who “shows coarse, stiff, long hairs” that “occupy the same regions as the male beard” (“This condition is a real indication for treatment”).54 In especially complicated cases, the dermatologist explained, the presentation of the woman patient’s “male secondary sex characteristics” is “shown by her expression as well as the distribution and coarseness of the hair.”55 When nature was functioning properly, experts after Descent presumed, men had body hair, and women did not.
More precisely, young women did not have body hair. Consistent with evolutionary arguments concerning sexual selection, physicians typically proclaimed hairiness to be of medical significance only for premenopausal women. Reproductive pair bonding was the goal. As physician Adolph Brand explained, the practitioner’s primary encounter with hypertrichosis was among women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, “[t]his being the period of a woman’s life during which her physical charms receive her greatest attention.”56 Another expert suggested that the “great majority” of cases of hypertrichosis affected women between the ages of twenty and thirty.57 The age of the patient affected not only medical diagnosis but also medical treatment. One physician reported a colleague’s therapeutic principles: “While his indications are humane and even chivalrous to female sufferers under twenty-five years, his advice [is] not to yield to the entreaties of a married woman.” For patients over forty-five, the physician advised forgoing all treatment.58
Body hair’s role in sexual and reproductive fitness was further emphasized by medical reports of patients’ subjective experiences of hairiness. One of the few women physicians recorded in the related literature, Dr. Henrietta Johnson, described “one beautiful and attractive woman” who “would not marry, lest the hairy tendency which had made her own life a wretched one, and which she had tried by every known artifice to conceal, might be transmitted to her female offspring.”59 (Johnson did not elaborate further on the “hairy tendency.”) Emphasizing young women’s deep, instinctual desire for hairlessness, dermatologist Ernest McEwen similarly insisted that women themselves yearned for effective treatment.
The woman afflicted feels herself an object of repulsion to the opposite sex, and as a result, set apart from the normal members of her own sex. She realizes that she bears a stigma of the male and that she does not run true to the female type; therefore, every female instinct in her demands that the thing which marks her as different from other women be removed.60
Although they could not agree on clear standards of “normal” hairiness, physicians remained assured that for young women, abnormal hair growth ran counter to “female instinct.”
ONGOING ATTEMPTS TO quantify and classify hair growth reflected broader efforts to discern exactly what “excessive” hair might signal about its possessor. Born of the same anthropometric traditions of comparative measurement and observation that gave rise to Darwin’s theories of variation, diverse groups of investigators began counting hairs as a way to engage wider social and political concerns. Their analyses were part of a significant cultural shift ongoing in the late nineteenth century: one moving “deviance” from its traditional location in criminal law to the domain of medical science.61
Particularly influential in this regard was the young field of study known as “sexology,” which approached most so-called sexual abnormalities not as perversions of a person’s object of desire (as later concepts of homosexuality would imply) but as reversals or confusions of one’s own sex role. Sexual deviance was defined largely by the observation of “virile” traits or habits among women or “effeminate” traits or habits among men. Early sexologists in Europe and North America thus focused on the observation of such traits and habits in individuals, enumerating and categorizing their case reports into various types of sexual “inversion.”62 The most influential sexologists of the late nineteenth century—Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Albert Moll—concentrated these observations on “secondary sexual characteristics.” Secondary sexual characteristics, Krafft-Ebing explained, were those “bodily and psychical” traits, such as facial hair or breasts, that develop “only during the period of puberty” and help “differentiate the two sexes.”63
Of course, the very concept of secondary sexual characteristics implied the possibility of slippage between “primary” and “secondary” identifications, and sexologists readily acknowledged the myriad difficulties of aligning the two. Sexologists further determined that inversions, forms of sexual deviance, were often subtle, complex, and even contradictory. “Observation teaches that the pure type of the man or the woman is often enough missed by nature,” Krafft-Ebing wrote, “that is to say that certain secondary male characteristics are found in woman and vice versa.” Examples might include “men with an inclination for female occupations (embroidery, toilet, etc.)” and “women with a decided predilection for manly sports.”64 The complexities of sexual classifications were amplified, sexologists believed, by racial variation in secondary sexual characteristics: “The higher the anthropological development of the race, the stronger these contrasts between man and woman, and vice versa.”65 As sexologists sought to distinguish the truly “pathological” inversion from a mild fondness for embroidery or boxing, sorting genuinely “feminine” characteristics from the “masculine” became paramount.
Body hair, considered one of the leading secondary sex characteristics, presented particular challenges to this effort. To begin, hair growth was troublingly unpredictable, varying from individual to individual, from life stage to life stage, and from season to season. Moreover, hair’s connection to sexual inversion remained uncertain, even as sexologists meticulously examined patients’ bodies for signs of “unusual” hair growth.66 The clinician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld, assessing the body hair of more than 500 men, claimed a link between sexual roles and relative amounts of hair. He determined that the beards of 132 of the “inverted” men in his study were “‘sparser than in average men’”; another 98 “had no body hair at all, 78 had unusually fine body hair, and 176 had body hair less dense than in average males.”67 Those findings were disputed by Krafft-Ebing, whose scrutiny of the face, trunk, pubic region, and extremities found no similar correspondence between hairiness and inversion.68 For Krafft-Ebing, it was less hair itself than attitudes toward hair that indicated sexual abnormality. To illustrate the point, Krafft-Ebing described the case of a “silent, retiring, un-social, and sullen” man who arrived at an asylum at the age of twenty-three. Over his years in the institution, “his personality became completely feminine.”69 Along with a request for women’s clothing and a transfer to the female wing of the hospital (where he might find protection from “men that wished to violate him”), the patient demanded the application of an “‘Oriental Hair-Remover’” in order that “no one may doubt” his true sex. For Krafft-Ebing, the patient’s manifest distaste for his own body hair, rather than his relative degree of pilosity, was the real indication