"...with mathematic precision" - continued...

The Clinic

The Parisian Hôpital de la Salpêtrière under the direction of famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot provides an excellent example. The Salpêtrière was a former gunpowder factory reconstructed as the largest female-hospice in France: More than 3,000 women – hysterics, vagabonds, prostitutes etc. – resided in a space of one quarter million square meters. It was a spectacle of madness, but also a mad spectacle. The Salpêtrière served as Charcot’s stage. There, the neurologist found everything that was needed for setting the scene: first of all, the amphitheater, where the maestro would present his Leçon du mardi, a demonstration lecture which has been passed on to us by Pierre-André Brouillet in a well-known painting.

Pierre-André Brouillet: Une leçon clinique du Dr. Charcot. Oil painting, 1887, Musée de Nice.

We see a room, illuminated by lamps and tall windows, divided in a realm for the viewers and one for the stage. The composition includes an audience, several assistants and the director himself in the role of the instructing physician accompanied by his protagonist, a hysterical woman, nearly bare and almost unconscious. Opposite Charcot hangs a board (occasionly cut off from the figure like here): as a picture-within-a-picture it provides stage directions which demonstrate what will be diagnosed on the stage, namely phase 2, figure G from the synopsis of the hysterical breakdown (see also Richer 1881, p. 168).