Remarkable things: Visual evidence and excess at Charcot’s Salpêtrière

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) pioneered the use of visual aids in his lectures at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière. He deployed photographs, casts, diagrams, graphs, drawings, lantern slides, and even patients to help the audience understand his innovative diagnoses, but that same visual imagery also informed his own conceptualizations of pathology. Charcot, whom Sigmund Freud famously called a “visuel,” made drawings of his patients and their autopsied organs while also encouraging the art-making of his many collaborators and protégés at the Salpêtrière in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Their “scientific artworks” epitomize the entanglement of art and medical science at the hospital. This article examines the role of visual media in diagnosing pathology under Charcot’s aegis, bringing to light images and objects that catalogue the case of Ambroise Bourdy. Here was a perfect example of the male hysteric, according to Charcot: a “robust” blacksmith and father who developed a hysterical contracture after a workplace injury. In 1882, Charcot’s Salpêtrière colleagues—including Dr. Henri Parinaud, Dr. Paul Richer, Louis Loreau, and Albert Londe—tested Bourdy’s eyes, made drawings and a cast of his contracted left hand, and photographed him in various poses. The surfeit of visual imagery of Bourdy purports to illustrate traumatic hysteria—however, it more effectively, if unintentionally, reveals a delight in art-making at the Salpêtrière.