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Charcot, Spectacle, and the Mise en Scène of the Salpêtrière

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Performing Neurology

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Abstract

I introduce the reader to the chief character of the book—namely Charcot—the theatre within which he acted (the Salpêtrière), and the tensions he negotiated, particularly that of the image versus bodily presence and temporal action. Charcot’s career is traced and the role of the image, vision, theatrical framing, and bodily presence is raised, before the Salpêtrière is characterized as a kind of theatre. It was frequently commented upon in such terms in newspapers and other contemporary accounts; in the words of novelist and theatre director Jules Claretie, the Salpêtrière was a melodramatic “city of misery” or “fully equipped” theatre.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Goetz et al., 231–5; Platel [Ignotus], “Cabotinage,” 1; Louis de Meurville, “Le docteur Charcot,” Gazette de France (18 August 1893): 1; C.L. Dana, “Charcot,” Medical Record (9 September 1893): 351.

  2. 2.

    For Charcot’s biography, see Goetz et al., 3–62; Simon-Dhouailly, ed., 31–43.

  3. 3.

    OC, vol. 7, pp. 302–353.

  4. 4.

    Goetz et al, p. 32; Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, “Les démoniaques dans l’art” suivi de “La foi qui guérit,” facsimile reproduction; ed. and commentary Georges Didi-Huberman and Pierre Fédida (Paris: Macula, 1984), 111–123.

  5. 5.

    F. Clifford Rose and W.F. Bynum, eds, Historical Abstracts of the Neurosciences (NY: Raven, 1980), 383–396.

  6. 6.

    On the relationship between Republicanism and the medical establishment, see Jack Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Goldstein, Console, 329–374.

  7. 7.

    Charles Sowerwine, France Since 1870 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001).

  8. 8.

    Micale, Approaching, 207–8. On these widespread social anxieties, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984).

  9. 9.

    OC, vol. 1, p. 183.

  10. 10.

    Henry Meige, “Charcot artiste,” NIPS, 11 (1898), esp. pp. 500–2; Sigrid Schade, “Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body,” Art History, 18.4 (December 1995): 499–517; Debora Silverman, Art nouveau in fin-de-siècle France (Berkeley: California University Press, 1989); James Parker, “The Hotel de Varengeville Room and the Room from the Palais Paar,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (November 1969): 129–146.

  11. 11.

    Jan Goldstein, “The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985): 547.

  12. 12.

    Robert Hillman, “A Scientific Study of Mystery: The Role of the Medical and Popular Press in the Nancy-Salpêtrière Controversy on Hypnotism,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 39.2 (1965): 163–183; Anne Harrington, “Metals and Magnets in Medicine: Hysteria, Hypnosis and Medical Culture in fin de siècle Paris,” Psychological Medicine, 18 (1988): 21–38; Marshall, “Kleist,” 261–281.

  13. 13.

    Edouard Brissaud and Pierre Marie, “Nécrologie: J.-M. Charcot,” Revue neurologique, 1.16 (31 August 1893): 30–31.

  14. 14.

    Goldstein, Console, 69–72, 85–101, 130–196; Caroline Hannaway and Ann La Berge, eds, Constructing Paris Medicine (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 1–70.

  15. 15.

    Charcot, Charcot, xvi.

  16. 16.

    Peugniez, 4.

  17. 17.

    Guillain, 51–52; C.F. Withington, “A Last Glimpse of Charcot at the Salpêtrière,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, CXXIX.8 (1893): 207.

  18. 18.

    Paul Richer, Georges Gilles de la Tourette and Albert Londe, “Avertissement,” in NIPS, 1 (1888): II.

  19. 19.

    See Michel Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey (Paris: Nathan, 2004); Denis Bernard and André Gunthert, L’instant rêvé Albert Londe (Nîmes: Chambon, 1993); Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995); Stephen Herbert, ed., A History of Pre-Cinema (London: Routledge, 2001); Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000).

  20. 20.

    The collection of the Musée d’histoire de la médecine de Paris includes several of these devices, whilst original traces are held in the Bibliothèque Charcot and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, Minneapolis.

  21. 21.

    Paul Richer, Physiologie artistique de l’homme en mouvement (Paris: Octave Doin, 1895), 15–16.

  22. 22.

    OC, vol. 5, p. 5, vol. 6, pp. 2–3.

  23. 23.

    OC, vol. 6, pp. 3–4.

  24. 24.

    OC, vol. 5, p. 6.

  25. 25.

    Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999). Vanessa Schwartz’s superb Spectacular Realities (LA: California University Press, 1998) offers an insightful analysis of how visual pleasure and flânerie was associated with such morbid para-medical sites as the Paris morgue and the Musée Grévin.

  26. 26.

    Désiré Bourneville, “J.-M. Charcot,” Archives de neurologie, 26.79 (September 1893): 194; OC, vol. 1, p. 2.

  27. 27.

    Jules Claretie, La vie à Paris (Paris: Victor Harvard, 1881), 125.

  28. 28.

    Jules Claretie, “Charcot, le consolateur,” Annales politiques et littéraires, 21 (1903): 180.

  29. 29.

    Mark Micale, “The Salpêtrière in the Age of Charcot,” Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985): 703–731.

  30. 30.

    Claretie, Vie, 125.

  31. 31.

    Maximilien Vessier, La Pitié-Salpêtrière (Paris: Groupe hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière, 1999).

  32. 32.

    Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (NY: Vintage, 1988).

  33. 33.

    Maurice Guillemot, “À la Salpêtrière,” Paris illustré, 5.22 (24 September 1887): 354–5.

  34. 34.

    Jules Claretie, Les amours d’un interne (Paris: Ollendorf, 1902), 69.

  35. 35.

    Victor Hugo, Les misérables, trans. Isabel Hapgood (Adelaide: Adelaide University Press, 2014), book IV, chapt. I, reproduced on <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hugo/victor/lesmis/book2.4.html.

  36. 36.

    Alexandre Guérin, “Une visite à la Salpêtrière,” Revue illustrée, 4.40 (1 August 1887): 97.

  37. 37.

    Claretie, “Charcot,” 179–180.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 179–180.

  39. 39.

    Guérin, 57.

  40. 40.

    Georges Guillain and Pierre Mathieu, La Salpêtrière (Paris: Masson, 1925), 25.

  41. 41.

    Guérin, 97, 175.

  42. 42.

    Moses Allen Starr et al. [23 November 1925], minutes of Boston Medical History Club centenary meeting, Boston Medical and Surgical Association, 194 (1926): 10.

  43. 43.

    Louis Boucher, La Salpêtrière (Paris: Progrès médical, 1883), 11–12.

  44. 44.

    Fulgence Raymond, Leçons sur les maladies de système nerveux (Paris: Octave Don, 1896), 6.

  45. 45.

    Didi-Huberman, Invention, 13.

  46. 46.

    On the history of the Jardin de Plantes, see Yves Laissus, Le musée national d’histoire naturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

  47. 47.

    Philippe Dagen, “Le ‘Premier artiste,’” Romantisme, 84 (1994): 69–78.

  48. 48.

    Guérin, 97.

  49. 49.

    Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), vol. 3, p. 13.

  50. 50.

    François Helme, Les jardins de la médecine (Paris: Vigot, 1907), 307–8.

  51. 51.

    Laissus, 68.

  52. 52.

    André de Latour de Lorde with Alfred Binet et al., Théâtre d’Épouvante (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1909), 6.

  53. 53.

    Goetz et al., 177–181, 213. It remains difficult even today to establish medical consensus regarding the nature, causes, and treatment of what is now classified as “non-epileptic seizure”; see John Gates, “Non-Epileptic Seizures,” Epilepsy and Behavior, 3 (2002): 28–33.

  54. 54.

    Peugniez, 3.

References

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  1. West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia

    Jonathan W. Marshall

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Marshall, J.W. (2016). Charcot, Spectacle, and the Mise en Scène of the Salpêtrière. In: Performing Neurology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51762-3_2

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