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William Acton is now more widely known as a doctor specializing in sexual medicine than he ever was during his lifetime and any other time prior to the 1960s. Acton's work is considered mostly in terms of what the British medical profession said about female sexual response. There is a lot more to Acton, even if we ignore the fact that he said virtually nothing about female sexuality. He published numerous articles in the British medical press, which have been all but ignored. He also was one of the first English doctors to give advice on how to educate one's children in sexual matters. This article considers Acton's writing in this area and compares it with other British medical practitioners in order to establish that Acton was not insane but, rather, that he was merely a member of the English medical profession.

This article looks at the boundary work performed by Victorian doctors in order to position themselves as beneficial to the court in helping to determine whether a woman had been raped. These doctors provided tangible physical evidence to support already widely-held beliefs about the nature of the rape victim. Such physical evidence could then be used to support, or undermine, the complainant's allegation. The article concludes that the reliance upon forensic evidence, the result of such boundary construction, is one of the major factors maintaining the current international "justice gap" in rape cases.

Résumé Cet article décrit dans ses grandes lignes le développement de la sexologie, en en résumant les contributions essentielles. Il montre que le souci de définir l'instinct sexuel dit « normal », et de cataloguer les variations par rapport à cette norme est au cœur des textes de sexologie. Ce n'est pas toujours la lecture qui en a été faite, toutefois. Beaucoup d'individus « pervers » les ont lus pour façonner autrement leurs propres vies et leurs propres pratiques, en recourant au discours de la science afin d'essayer d'établir une nouvelle caractérisation du « normal ». En ce sens, le développement de la sexologie a permis de redéfinir la sexualité normale de deux façons.