A Clinical Lesson at the 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.