Asti hustvedt biography of michaels and associates

During the decade of the s, three young women found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris under the direction of the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The stories of their lives as patients on the ward are a strange amalgam of science and religion, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, love, and theater.

Biography. Asti Hustvedt is

The illness they suffered from was hysteria. This disease was not an arcane preoccupation of the doctors that treated them, but an affliction that would increasingly capture the public imagination. Stories about hysterical patients filled the columns of newspapers. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists. Hysterics were photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn.

Hysteria had become a fascinating and fashionable spectacle. But who were these hysterical women? Where did they come from? What role did they play in their own peculiar form of stardom? And what exactly were they suffering from? To answer these questions, I combed hospital records and municipal archives. I read case histories, gathered testimony from the scientific and the popular press of the day, and sifted through visual documents.

I read memoirs and letters written by those who spent time at the Salpetriere in the late nineteenth century, including the young Sigmund Freud, who admired Charcot, and the enormously vindictive Leon Daudet, who did not. I pursued false leads and hit dead ends.