Case 26. _The girl-stabber of Bozen_ (reported by Demme, “Buch der Verbrechen,” Bd. ii, p. 341). In 1829, H., aged 30, soldier, became the subject of legal investigation. At different times and in different places, he had wounded girls with bread-knives or pocket-knives, by stabbing them in the abdomen, probably in the region of the genitals. He gave, as a motive for these acts, heightened sexual impulse, increasing to the intensity of fury, which found satisfaction only in the thought and act of stabbing persons of the female sex. This impulse would pursue him for days at a time. He would then pass into a confused mental state, which would clear away only when the impulse had been satisfied by the deed. In the act of stabbing he had a satisfaction like that of completed coitus, which was increased by the sight of the blood that ran from the knife. In his tenth year the sexual instinct became powerfully manifest. At first he gave himself up to masturbation, and felt physically and mentally weakened by it. Before he became a girl-stabber he had satisfied his sexual lust in violation of immature girls, by causing them to practice masturbation on him, and by sodomy. Gradually the thought came to him of how pleasurable it would be to stab a young and pretty girl in the region of the genitals, and take delight in the sight of the blood running from the knife. Among his effects were found copies of objects of art and obscene pictures, painted by himself, of Mary’s conception, and of the “congealed thought of God” in the lap of the Virgin. He was considered a peculiar, very irritable man, shy of people, given to women, moody, and glum. He was apparently a person[54] that had become impotent through earlier sexual excesses, and who was thus predisposed, by the continuance of intense libido sexualis, and heredity, to perversion of the sexual life. Case 27. In the “sixties” the inhabitants of Leipzig were frightened by a man who was accustomed to attack young girls on the street and stab them in the upper-arm with a dagger. Finally arrested, he was recognized as a sadist, who, at the instant of stabbing, had an ejaculation, and with whom the wounding of the girls was an equivalent for coitus. (Wharton, “A Treatise on Mental Unsoundness,” § 623. Philadelphia, 1873.)[55] Impotence exists, likewise, in the next three cases. It may be psychical, however, in that the principal tone of the vita sexualis lies in the sadistic inclination, and the normal elements are distorted:—