Dynamic Medicine and Theatrical Form at the fin de siècle : A formal analysis of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot's pedagogy, 1862–1893

He monopolised hysteria. He astonished men. He frightened women. He practised in sum scientific ham-acting [cabotinage].

His success has been enormous. Oh the great allure of hamming it up! It has profited Charcot, but science also. He advanced science in the manner of Wagner, the great musical ham.

Charcot and Wagner seem to me to be of the same race.

—Ignotus [pseudonym of Felix Platel]²

From the time of his appointment at the Salpêtrière Women's Hospice, Paris, in 1862 through to his death in 1893, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot lectured in neurological diseases, pathological anatomy, geriatrics and other topics. Charcot's famous lessons on hysterioepileptic seizure and hypnotic automatism drew the most public attention. His presentations as a whole though focused on less dramatic conditions such as complications of gait and locomotor coordination (ataxia, sclerosis in plaques, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Charcot's work has elicited considerable attention from feminists and historians of hysteria and gender, medical historians, literary critics, photographic historians and others.³ While commentators typically acknowledge the theatrical quality of Charcot's presentations, there has been no sustained analysis of what this constituted, the significance of this theatricalism, or its precise nature. The accounts which appeared in the contemporary lay and medical press however demonstrate that Charcot was almost as well known for the aesthetic style of his presentations as he was for their specific content. An examination of what this style was, how it functioned, as well as its strengths and weaknesses, is therefore overdue. While the transgressive nature of hysterical symptomatology has since become a truism of the historiography, the discursive transgressions embodied within Charcot's own demonstrative technique—a technique which he applied to all of the diseases he described, from goitre through to epilepsy—has not been acknowledged. It is this topic addressed below.

Charcot's chosen field of neurology was a new branch of medicine. His focus on the dynamic function of the body in time and space forced Charcot to find new ways to represent these essentially performative disorders.⁴ The need for a novel form of medical representation and analysis brought the work of Charcot and his associates dangerously close to theatrical and para-theatrical aesthetics via the creation of a new multi-media style whose dynamically embodied, live form echoed that of the living, neurological body which was its subject. Charcot was an accomplished dramaturge whose refusal to employ elaborate rhetorical flourishes within his personal presentation constituted in itself a highly mannered performance of rationalist, scientific authority. A close study of the discourse which surrounds Charcot's work reveals that this project contained within it the possibility for inversion, with Charcot's "science" being read as a form of implicitly fictional "theatre," more closely allied to such sensationalistic precedents as Étienne-Gapsard Robertson's phantasmagoria of the 1780s, than to the secure, Positivist propriety which French medicine otherwise sought to project.⁵ Spectators such as Platel perceived this formal contradiction, likening the neuropathologist's presentations to the arational, melodramatic aesthetics advocated by various dramaturges like Richard Wagner and others.

I. Improvised and ex cathedra Teaching

Dogmatic teaching, or what we call ex cathedra lessons, is something artificial . . . My aim is to fool no one, and so, before your eyes, I will plunge right in and proceed just as I do in my own practice. I . . . interview patients whom I do not know.

—Charcot, leçon du mardi (15 Nov 1887)⁶

Charcot presented two distinct lecture series. There was the fully-prepared, afternoon, vendredi (Friday) lessons, offered as part of the Faculty of Medicine courses. The second was the morning, mardi (Tuesday) lessons—in addition to other less formalised presentations [Figure 1].⁷ Each lasted for approximately two hours: slightly longer than a short play.⁸

Charcot and others emphasised the improvised nature of the mardi stream, in which he interviewed subjects who had ostensibly been chosen that morning from the clinical admissions of the hospice (la policlinique).⁹ A comparison of the published lectures from...