The Anatomy of Hysteria: Clinical Collaborations and Coercions in 19th Century Paris - Part I: Creating the Perfect Hysterical Specimen.

Illustrated Lecture with Asti Hustvedt, author of “Medical Muses, Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris”.

Date: Wednesday, January 28th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ($20 for the 3 Lectures on Hysteria ) ( Tickets Here )
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY.

Hysteria as a neurological diagnosis no longer exists, but during the late-nineteenth century, as many as half of all women were thought to suffer form one of its myriad forms. At that time, Jean-Martin Charcot’s hysteria ward at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris was filled with twitching, convulsing and hallucinating women. Three of them—Blanche Wittmann, Augustine Gleizes and Geneviève Basile Legrand—became medical celebrities. They were photographed, sketched and painted, written about in the popular press and transformed into fictional characters in novels and plays. Every week eager crowds of doctors, writers, artists, actors, socialites and the merely curious arrived at the hospital to watch them enact their spectacular symptoms. The remarkable story of their lives as patients in the clinic is a strange amalgam of science and religion, the natural and the supernatural, hypnotism, love and theater.

Blanche Wittmann, a confused and timid teenager when she was first admitted to the hospital, would eventually become a medical diva whose fame spread throughout Europe, where she was known as the “Queen of Hysterics.” Tonight’s lecture will investigate some of the techniques Charcot used to transform Blanche from an ordinary hysteric into an exemplary medical specimen whose symptoms became prototypical, clinically perfect. Charcot’s methods included hypnotism, the bizarre medical art of “dermagraphism,” or writing on the female body, and forays into the carnival and the supernatural.

Part II: The Photographic Iconography of Hysteria - Wednesday, February 4th.

Part III: Hysterical Demons and Pathological Saints - Wednesday, February 11th

Asti Hustvedt is an independent scholar who has a PhD in French literature. She has written extensively on hysteria and is the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. She has published many translations and is the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France.