His mother Klara Antonia Carolina was a daughter of the renowned Heidelberg legal scholar and defense attorney Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier.

He passed the state examination in 1863 "summa cum laude" with his work on "Sensory Delusions" and earned his Doctorate in Medicine.

[2] Recovery from a bout of typhoid led him to spend a summer in Zürich, where he became acquainted with Wilhelm Griesinger's brain anatomical studies.

After losing the battle for his brother's life, who was just 24, a restorative and art-focused journey, coupled with visits to psychiatric and neurological institutions, took him several weeks through southern Europe.

After the end of the war, he was put in charge of the electrotherapeutic station in Baden-Baden, mainly for the neurological follow-up treatment of wounded soldiers.

Given the reputation that Richard von Krafft-Ebing had meanwhile established in the professional world — as he was also frequently consulted abroad (Italy, France, Russia, etc.)

Psychiatric Clinic of the Lower Austrian State Asylum following Maximilian Leidesdorf, and he became a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna.

Several professional publications appeared again from his pen, such as in 1894 his well-known monographs on Progressive Paralysis—a disease he also highlighted in 1897 at the International Medical Congress in Moscow in a highly regarded lecture.

According to Volkmar Sigusch, he adopted the degeneration theories of his French research colleagues[5] and borrowed the term Sadism used in France since 1834 (Dictionnaire universel de Boiste, eighth edition)[6] as the name for a pathology.

"He was an utterly noble nature," reads the obituary in the Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, "toward his patients he was of touching kindness and friendliness.

His tall figure, his firm stride, his calm gaze, his intellectual countenance had often a marvelous effect on the most agitated patients."

He was led to this still relatively-unexplored field of work (as per his own accounts in a letter to him) by the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to whom he pretended to support his theory of the "Urning" as a quasi-third gender.

In the 19th century, homosexuality was widely considered by the public and especially the churches to be an expression of immoral mindset and lifestyle, a result of seduction, sexual excess or degenerate heredity (decadence theory).

Although Krafft-Ebing was considered an authoritative figure in the field of forensic medicine at his time, this theory remained without consequences for decriminalization.

[17] Krafft-Ebing proposed a theory of homosexuality as biologically anomalous and originating in the embryonic and fetal stages of gestation, which evolved into a "sexual inversion" of the brain.

In 1901, in an article in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), he changed the biological term from anomaly to differentiation.

Krafft-Ebing's conclusions about homosexuality are now largely forgotten, partly because Sigmund Freud's theories were more interesting to physicians (who considered homosexuality to be a psychological problem) and partly because he incurred the enmity of the Austrian Catholic Church when he psychologically associated martyrdom (a desire for sanctity) with hysteria and masochism.

A bibliography of von Krafft-Ebing's writings can be found in A. Kreuter, Deutschsprachige Neurologen und Psychiater, München 1996, Band 2, pp.