The doctored woman

At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris.  However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic advancement which, ironically enough, was to prove feminine in nothing but name.
 
While some women at this time were busy playing Calliope to Europe ’s artists and musicians, swathes of other down-and-outs were falling prey to the disease of the moment, Hysteria. Interred in the notorious L’Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris – a century later Lady Diana Spencer would be taken here in her final moments – hysterics would experience muse-dom from quite a different angle. The female patients were photographed, sketched, pushed before crowds to display their unpredictable, fit-induced contortions, like performers in a sideshow. The fact that many hysterics could on demand bleed through the pores of their skin invited several physicians to sign them with their initials; these possessive inscriptions would prove indelible whenever this bleeding occurred. The Belle Époque painter could take a life model as inspiration for his representation; the hysteria physician quite literally moulded woman into his art.
 
Hustvedt does an excellent job of piecing together the evidence for this overarching phenomenon of nature versus art. Her concern is not so much to clarify what this strange and persistently indefinable disease actually was or is (though she examines the symptoms and sources of some modern parallels), but rather to explore how the illness was cultivated in the setting of the Salpêtrière. Her account therefore juxtaposes documents — which suggest that women feigned or exaggerated symptoms to coincide with physicians’ diagnoses —with transcripts of hysterics’ express denials that it was ever a case of artifice usurping reality.
 
Although one senses the author of this book empathises more with the plight of the patients than the contribution their suffering made to medical science (or indeed art), her account is nevertheless balanced by an attempt to examine what the doctors of this institution were hoping to achieve by their less than orthodox methods. Since antiquity women had been perceived as unstable creatures, prone to outbursts once thought to stem from their possession of a ‘wandering womb’. One of the most famous doctors of the Salpêtrière, Jean-Martin Charcot, tried to dislodge this deep-seated association of femaleness and hysteria by seeking the root of the disease in a brain abnormality ungoverned by gender. It is a pity his theory did not limit his practice to medical examination.

The Normandy-born medical intern (later journalist and politician) Désiré-Magloire Bourneville emerges as one of the more likeable Salpêtrière physicians.  More than a decade before Freud’s theories on the matter, he observed that traumatic life experiences — rape, in many of these women’s cases — give rise to ‘reminiscences’ which may impact upon physical health, and as such are worth documenting through the patient’s own words. More than simply photograph and prod his patients, Bourneville seems to have spent long hours in conversation with them.
 
It would be possible to take from this book the idea that life in the Salpêtrière was in some way liberating, or at least succouring, for many of the deprived and desperate women who entered its wards. Individuals such as ‘Blanche’ and ‘Augustine’, whose stories Hustvedt spins out in depth, found fame out of their ‘performances’ as ideal hysterics, even becoming muses of artists and writers. But this was not before they were subjected to endless ovary-compressions; forced hypnoses, false seductions by the very men supposed to be treating them, and derision.  An ex-patient of the Salpêtrière shot her former doctor in revenge over his mistreatment of her, and for ‘ruining [her] life’.  She can’t have been alone in these sentiments.
 
If nothing else, cultivating the muse was making the best of a bad deal. In an age of supposed sexual liberation, there’s something to be learnt from that.