Medical Muses

<p>In the 1870s three women--Blanch Augustine and Genevieve--found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris under the direction of the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Their illness came to define the era and in turn they became medical celebrities: every week eager crowds arrived at the hospital to observe their symptoms; they were photographed sculpted painted and transformed into characters in novels. The remarkable story of their lives as patients in the clinic is a strange amalgam of intimate details and public exposure science and religion medicine and the occult hypnotism love and theater.<br />But who were Blanche Augustine and Genevieve? What role did they play in their own peculiar form of stardom? And what exactly were they suffering from? Hysteria--with its dramatic seizures hallucinations and reenactments of past traumas--may be an illness of the past but the notions of femininity that lie behind it offer insights into disorders of the present.</p>