Eine klinische Vorlesung an der Salpêtrière

In the 1880s the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris was the most famous place in the world to study the nervous system, and its director, Jean-Martin Charcot, drew crowds. Every week he staged public lessons on hysteria, and this shows one of them in 1887. The woman swooning into an assistant's arms is Blanche Wittmann, a patient Charcot hypnotised again and again before an audience of doctors and students. A young Viennese physician named Sigmund Freud had studied under Charcot in the winter of 1885 and later hung an engraving of this very scene above his consulting-room couch. On the back wall, easy to miss, a drawing of an arched, contorted body shows the pose Charcot taught his students to recognise.