PISANUS FRAXI
31
original chaos and disorder they were intended to bring under com–
mand. This melancholy compromise will be familiar to anyone who
has read much scholarship, in any field of study. Ashbee's work is
only an extreme example of a representative instance.
Ashbee did not, naturally, think of himself in this way, and we
can perhaps approximate the image he had of himself by examining
his remarks on the writer he most praises and toward whom he ex–
presses the strongest sense of affinity, Martin Schurig. "Of all the
learned physicians or surgeons who have written upon the physical
connection of the sexes," Ashbee writes, "no one has treated the sub–
ject so thoroughly, or brought together so many curious, interesting
and extraordinary details." And it brings him particular pleasure,
Ashbee remarks, to be able to bring "these little known, and less read
volumes" before the "lovers of the curiosities of literature." Although
physicians before Schurig had made inquiries into sexual matters
and written about them, "the particulars, observations, and anecdotes
given by Schurig far surpass any thing" that had previously been
done. But it is not merely the freeness and boldness of Schurig's com–
pendia which attract Ashbee, but the thoroughness of his scholarship:
"Authorities are carefully and fully given; and citations are repro–
duced in the language and words of their authors. Each volume is
furnished with a
Syllabus Autorum
and an
Index Rerum,
alpha–
betically arranged . . . and verified.
It
is this thoroughness, peculiar
to erudite Germans, which renders their books so valuable to the
student, although by the reader for mere amusement they may be
thought troublesome and unattractive." Schurig was, in the words of a
nineteenth-century French historian of medicine, the author of
<rune
serie de vaste monographies, dans lesquelles il a rassemble une mass
considerable d'observations, puisees de toutes parts, et ou
il
rappelle
a
peu pres tout ce quie avait ete fait avant lui."
He was, in other
words one of the first writers of what was to come to be known as
,
Sittengeschichten,
enormous tomes whose intentions waver between
the quasi-scientific and the pseudo-pornographic, whose pedantry is
genuine but whose scholarship is spurious, and whose stupidity
is
in–
vincible. These gala productions of the mind seem to be a speciality
of German culture, and continue until today to be turned out in dis–
concerting quantity.
