Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris

A fascinating study of three young female hysterics who shaped our early notions of psychology.

Blanche, Augustine, and Genevi¨ve found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetri¨re Hospital in 1870s Paris, where their care was directed by the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. They became medical celebrities: every week, eager crowds arrived at the hospital to observe their symptoms; they were photographed, sculpted, painted, and transformed into characters in novels. The remarkable story of their lives as patients in the clinic is a strange amalgam of intimate details and public exposure, science and religion, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, love, and theater.

But who were Blanche, Augustine, and Genevi¨ve? What role did they play in their own peculiar form of stardom? And what exactly were they suffering from? Hysteria€"with its dramatic seizures, hallucinations, and reenactments of past traumas€"may be an illness of the past, but the notions of femininity that lie behind it offer insights into disorders of the present. 40 black-and-white illustrations