The Anatomy of Hysteria: Clinical Collaborations and Coercions in 19th Century Paris - Part III: Hysterical Demons and Pathological Saints

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

Date, Wednesday, February 11th
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.

Geneviève Basile Legrand found a career in a particular niche of Charcot’s theory: she became a living example of his conviction that demons and saints were hysterics. In a creative manipulation, Charcot interpreted cases of divine and demonic possession as pathology, transforming the demonically and divinely possessed into hysterics, and his hysteric Geneviève into something of a saint and something of a witch. Tonight’s lecture includes an appropriately morbid love story for Valentine’s Day, a tale that tells of the death of Geneviève’s fiancé and her conviction that he haunted her hospital bed at night as a demon lover.

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.