Dying at the Salpêtrière: Autopsies and the Afterlife of the Hysteric

"LA MORGUE EST UN SPECTACLE à la portée de toutes les bourses, que se payent gratuitement les passants pauvres ou riches."¹ This is how Émile Zola characterizes the Parisian morgue in his 1868 novel Thérèse Raquin. In it, Laurent finds himself a frequent visitor to this institution since, after having killed his lover's husband, Camille, by pushing him into the Seine, Laurent is haunted by the murder. He soon starts visiting the morgue in the hope that the cadaver has been fished out and that seeing his body might bring him some peace by confirming that Camille is definitely dead. If Laurent is able to enter the morgue repeatedly and look at each of its cadavers, it is because the nineteenth-century morgue bears little resemblance to what we now know morgues to be. Whereas today's morgues are closely controlled environments where dead bodies are kept hidden in refrigerated drawers, the Parisian morgue that Laurent anxiously visited in the days following his crime was a public place where one could roam freely. In fact, the presence of the public was necessary and encouraged since, as historian Vanessa Schwartz explains, throughout its history the morgue's main goal was to serve as a depository for the anonymous dead.² If these spectacular bodies captured the imagination of passersby, other invisible cadavers also left a lasting imprint on the fin-de-siècle imaginaire. In Parisian hospitals, dead bodies were routinely subjected to clinical autopsies, and it is these other bodies' unstated contribution to scientific research as well as their wider nineteenth-century cultural prevalence that I propose to explore in this article.

Historian Bruno Bertherat points out the panoptic quality of the morgue where bodies were lined up behind a glass window, their identification mostly left to viewers.³ In fact, to fulfill this mission the morgue needed to be easily accessible to the public and its cadavers visible. Thus, in contrast to historian Philippe Ariès, who famously argued that death had become invisible in the nineteenth century,⁴ Schwartz sees in the morgue an example of what she calls a "spectacular 'real life' that chroniclers, visitors and inhabitants alike had come to associate with Parisian Culture" (Schwartz 47). Similarly, Bertherat notes that any forensic purpose was secondary since "On n'y vient pas seulement pour reconnaître un de ses proches; on y vient essentiellement par curiosité" (Bertherat 377). Thus, visiting the dead had become a popular fin-de-siècle attraction. The visibility of these anonymous dead bodies, some of them in wretched shape, and their physical proximity to an inquisitive public, pose important questions concerning common conceptions of death in the nineteenth century, as well as the hypervisibility of death in the context of the rise of forensic medicine. A memento mori for the fin de siècle, the morgue was the place to satisfy a voyeuristic compulsion to see death and reflects what Schwartz terms the public's abundant "desire to look," which was an important cultural facet of the late nineteenth century (Schwartz 58). If dead bodies in the Morgue betrayed the "public taste for reality" in the fin de siècle, they nonetheless also fulfilled a practical role in that cadavers were used to solve crimes and identify the dead.⁵ Around the same time, in Parisian hospitals, dead bodies were dissected in the hope of uncovering the body's invisible inner workings, with a view to exposing the material existence of diseases and furthering medical research.

In the autopsy amphitheater

In the field of forensic medicine, the identification of bodies typically precedes the practice of an autopsy performed to establish a cause of death, a practice rooted in the question of visibility. As a surgical procedure, autopsy originated in Antiquity, and its Greek etymology points to its promise 'to see with one's own eyes.' Though commonly practiced since Antiquity, autopsies gained greater visibility in the second half of the nineteenth century as criminal investigations relied increasingly on forensic medicine. Autopsies had the potential to uncover a hidden truth...