The Anatomy of Hysteria: Clinical Collaborations and Coercions in 19th Century Paris - Part II: The Photographic Iconography of Hysteria

An Illustrated lecture with Asti Hustvedt, author of ” Medical Muses, Hysteria in Ninetheenth Century Paris”.

Date: Wednesday, February 4th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8($20 for the 3 Lectures on Hysteria ) ( Tickets Here )
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424A 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.

Augustine Gleizes was not as famous as Blanche during her stay at the Salpêtrière, yet over time she has become Charcot’s most celebrated hysteric. Later generations have turned her into an icon: an object of desire, a victim of misogyny or a feminist rebel, depending on who is claiming her for themselves. Tonight’s lecture will focus on the intersection of photography and hysteria. The camera was meant to transform Augustine into a series of isolated symptoms, and the perfectly flat and beautiful images that resulted were held up as evidence of Charcot’s symptomology. While these pictures of Augustine were intended to illustrate specific neurological symptoms, they also inevitably depict the girl. We end up looking at the person attached to the pathology, and this compromises the photograph’s status as medical illustration.

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.