Retrospective Medicine, Hypnosis, Hysteria and French Literature, 1875–1895

Abstract

The demise of hysteria as a reputable medical diagnosis in the 1880s and 1890s and its eventual ‘dismemberment’ by doctors such as Joseph Babinski¹ are generally attributed, in the first instance, to the success of the Nancy medical school in advancing its theses regarding suggestion. Suggestion, argued Dr Hippolyte Bernheim and his colleagues, played an important role in preparing Jean-Martin Charcot’s Salpêtrière hysterics for public exhibition of their symptoms. If hysteria’s behaviours had been ‘cultivated’ by the staff of La Salpêtrière, then the ailment, in its four-stage, Charcot-dictated form, did not exist. But success in the ‘quarrel’ of hysteria, as it has been called,² depended also on the ability of La Salpêtrière to maintain not just medical but public credibility vis-à-vis its positions. Two Charcot-led initiatives, little studied up until now in this particular context, clearly produced a contrary effect in the reading public’s mind and contributed, in some measure at least, to the waning of La Salpêtrière’s authority.