This paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault’s statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck’s own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple ‘temporal layers.’ The layering model in the history of concepts may be useful for complicating the historical periodizations commonly invoked by historians of sexuality, overcoming historiographic temptations to reduce complex cultural and intellectual phenomena to a unified Zeitgeist. The paper also shows that a haunting reference to ‘concepts’ among scholars of the long history of sexual medicine indicates the emergence of a de facto methodology of conceptual history, albeit one in need of further refinement. It is proposed that reading Koselleck alongside Foucault provides a useful starting-point for precisely this kind of theoretical development.

本文借鉴了米歇尔·福柯和莱因哈特·科塞莱克的方法，反思了撰写性医学的长篇概念史所面临的挑战。福柯关于 19 世纪破裂的陈述与他晚年对长期概念连续性的强调一起考虑，暗示了类似于科塞莱克自己对表达为多个“时间层”的不同类型历史遗产的适应。概念史中的分层模型可能有助于使性史学家常用的历史分期复杂化，克服将复杂的文化和知识现象简化为统一的时代精神的史学诱惑. 该论文还表明，在性医学悠久历史的学者中对“概念”的一个令人难以忘怀的提及表明了一种事实上的概念史方法论的出现，尽管需要进一步完善。有人建议，与福柯一起阅读科塞莱克，为这种理论发展提供了一个有用的起点。