“Where are the hysterics,
those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long
history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender
and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex,
flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative
prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical
documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the
humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients
confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens
for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his
male colleagues.
