year or two,
and on one occasion, being in a state of erection, struck the girl three
times on the breast and abdomen with a kitchen knife bought for the
purpose. He was much ashamed of his act immediately afterward, and, all
the circumstances being taken into consideration, he was acquitted by the
court.[104] Here we seem to have the obscure and latent fascination of
blood, which is almost normal, germinating momentarily into an active
impulse which is distinctly abnormal, though it produced little beyond
those incisions which Vatsyayana disapproved of, but still regarded as a
part of courtship. One step more and we are amid the most outrageous and
extreme of all forms of sexual perversion: with the heroes of De Sade's
novels, who, in exemplification of their author's most cherished ideals,
plan scenes of debauchery in which the flowing of blood is an essential
element of coitus; with the Marshall Gilles de Rais and the Hungarian
Countess Bathory, whose lust could only be satiated by the death of
innumerable victims.

This impulse to stab--with no desire to kill, or even in most
cases to give pain, but only to draw blood and so either
stimulate or altogether gratify the sexual impulse--is no doubt
the commonest form of sanguinary sadism. These women-stabbers
have been known in France as _piqueurs_ for nearly a century, and
in Germany are termed _Stecher_ or _Messerstecher_ (they have
been studied by Naecke, "Zur Psychologie der sadistischen
Messerstecher," _Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie_, Bd. 35,
1909). A case of this kind where a man stabbed girls in the
abdomen occurred in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth
century, and in 1819 or 1820 there seems to have been an epidemic
of _piqueurs_ in Paris; as we learn from a letter of Charlotte
von Schiller's to Knebel; the offenders (though perhaps there was
only one) frequented the Boulevards and the Palais Royal and
stabbed women in the buttocks or thighs; they were never caught.
About the same time similar cases of a slighter kind occurred in
London, Brussels, Hamburg, and Munich.

Stabbers are nearly always men, but cases of the same perversion
in women are not unknown. Thus Dr. Kiernan informs me of an Irish
woman, aged 40, and at the beginning of the menopause, who, in
New York in 1909, stabbed five men with a hatpin. The motive was
sexual and she told one of the men that s