Reviews for Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere

The average rating for Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-13 00:00:00 Steve Ramsden This is a really difficult book to review because it holds pretty much everything available about the women of the Salpêtrière and the photographic methods in the English language. Huberman writes in a very flowery, disconnected way that is frustrating for academic contexts but rewarding when seen as poetic asides. The women at the Salpêtrière are a fascinating look at what I call the epidemic of "mundane PTSD"'not of men coming back from war'but of women, predisposed by poverty and familial abuse, developing the same horrid cycles of trauma from physical or sexual assault. The agency in which these women attempted to have over their body (either from their literal inability to control it in fits to the male doctors orchestrating them) is fascinating and saddening. I'd link my paper but it was so personal and already a relic of who I was only a month ago. Suffice to say, I would have been sent here'so here's to healing'and my absolute madwomen sisters <3

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-04 00:00:00 Paul West it amazes me to think that just a century and a quarter ago in France this was the cutting edge of medical science: staged theatrics photographed for sale while fantasizing on wandering, uncontrolled uteri. I wad drawn this fascinated by the fact that "hysteria" shares an etymology with "hysterectomy". The hysteric is under control of the disordered womb. Freud put Charcot, the conductor of this symphony of female mistreatment, on a pedestal, making pilgrimages for education, cocaine, and autopsies. This is a translation of a work originally in French and it feels as if the poetry and metaphor from the original is at times awkward and difficult in translation. While the on site photographic studio captured psychic aurae and seizures for sexualized description, Charcot's lectures featured dramatic demonstrations of triggered throes and coercion under hypnosis. The detailed story of one unfortunate inmate is that of Augustin, sexual victim turned star performer for special freedoms, really tells the whole story of women locked away and then subsumed into kaleidoscope of proto-psychiatric patriarchal fantasy.