A man of good position had suddenly murdered a youth, and was executed for the crime, which, according to Hoessli, was due to homosexual love and jealousy.

Hoessli was not a trained scholar; he was in business at Glarus as a skillful milliner, the most successful in the town.

His own temperament is supposed to have been bisexual.

His book was prohibited by the local authorities and at a later period the entire remaining stock was destroyed in a fire, so that its circulation was very small.

It is now, however, regarded by some as the first serious attempt to deal with the problem of homosexuality since Plato's _Banquet_.[115] Some years later, in 1852, Casper, the chief medico-legal authority of his time in Germany,--for it is in Germany that the foundations of the study of sexual inversion have been laid,--pointed out in Casper's _Vierteljahrsschrift_ that pederasty, in a broad sense of the word, was sometimes a kind of "moral hermaphroditism," due to a congenital psychic condition, and also that it by no means necessarily involved sodomy (_immissio penis in anum_).