Journal of the History of the Neurosciences最新文献

Much has been written, mostly in overly critical terms, about Jean-Martin Charcot's use of images in his hysteria research. Besides the images of patients Charcot produced for his clinical research, one other image has preoccupied present-day scholars-André Brouillet's painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière. Unveiled at the 1887 Salon in Paris, this life-sized painting depicts Charcot lecturing on hysteria to his male audience while presenting a swooning female patient. For many present-day critics, Brouillet's painting symbolizes Charcot's purported misuse of his female hysteria patients. Contrary to such interpretations, this article shows that Brouillet's painting did not merely serve as an iconic visual representation of Charcot's hysteria research but was also used by Charcot as an active epistemic tool in his research on hysterical amnesia. Through a close reading of Charcot's only published lecture on hysterical amnesia, which he held on December 22, 1891, I analyze the process through which Charcot generated new medical insights into hysterical amnesia. I thereby trace the decisive role that Une leçon clinique played in this process.

Biographies, articles, and meetings devoted to the founder of modern neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot, are typically dithyrambic, if not hagiographic. It seems that the striking professional and familial qualities of Charcot have erased any other characteristic of the person, and scratches on the Master image commonly have not been well accepted. With this in mind, it is interesting to present and evaluate the rather negative opinions on Charcot by the famous French writer Léon Daudet, who initially was very close to the Charcots through his father, Alphonse Daudet, and who wrote rather extensively on Charcot in his diary and memoirs. Our point is not to underline these writings as the "truth" about Charcot's personality and life (Daudet, who was a prominent extreme right-wing figure, was known to exaggerate and play with his sharp opinions), but Daudet's criticisms paradoxically provide a fascinating perspective, which may help to reconstruct better who Charcot really was in counterbalancing a bit the overcrowded, politically correct, praising group.

Jean-Martin Charcot's 1883 lectures on aphasia at the Salpêtrière Hospital were seen as the starting point for the development of a psychology in the work of the famous neurologist. In his lectures, Charcot set out a theory of language function at the cerebral level, distinguishing between the different centers involved in speech production and those necessary for reading. His lectures, which also postulated the independence of ideas from words, were to resonate beyond aphasia specialists, and particularly with alienists. To document this dimension of the reception of neurology in the field of psychiatry, this article refers to Jules Séglas's synthesis on Les troubles du langage chez les aliénés, published in 1892, which summarized the knowledge acquired during the nineteenth century about modifications of expression in madness and whose original ideas were to mark the psychiatric semiology of the early-twentieth century. The analysis details how Séglas cited and adapted Charcot's conceptions to explain the production of incomprehensible speech in idiocy and the formation of hallucinations, thus contributing to the spread of the neurologist's model among his fellow alienists.

In the era after World War II, Francis (Frank) Forster (1912-2006) became a preeminent American neurologist and epileptologist, with international prominence in the study of reflex epilepsy. Forster's interest in reflex epilepsy began with a chance observation of the condition, in 1946, in a four-year-old girl. When medical measures failed to control her somatosensory-evoked seizures, Forster recommended surgery, and then facilitated transfer to Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Forster traveled to Montreal for the child's surgery. The surgery on February 27, 1948, proved to be curative for the child, and Forster's interactions with Penfield and epileptologist Herbert Jasper (1906-1999) made a lasting impression. This study reviews the medical and surgical history of this case, which strongly influenced Forster's career.

The establishment of neurology schools in Latin America during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries profoundly influenced the French neurology school. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the neurology department at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris held a preeminent position as the global hub of neurology. Professor Jean-Martin Charcot, widely acclaimed as the father of modern neurology, was the most revered neurology professor of the nineteenth century. Many physicians from diverse countries across South America (notably Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, and Colombia), the Caribbean (Cuba), and Mexico pursued specialized training in neurology under Charcot's tutelage, and even after his passing in 1893, they continued their training with his numerous disciples. As a result, nearly two centuries after the birth of Charcot, his enduring contributions to the field of neurology remain vibrantly influential, particularly in Latin America.

In 1908-1909, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), best remembered for The Scream (1893), spent eight months under Daniel Jacobson's care in a private nerve clinic in Copenhagen. Munch was suffering from alcohol abuse, and his signs and symptoms included auditory hallucinations, persecutory delusions, paresthesias, paralyses, violent mood swings, depression, loss of control, fatigue, and the loss of his basic ability to take care of himself. He was treated with rest, a fortifying diet, massages, baths, fresh air, limited exercise, and nonconvulsive electrotherapy. After he had settled in, Jacobson allowed Munch to draw, paint, and engage in photography. Munch responded with a portrait of Jacobson and a small but intriguing sketch of himself at one of his electrotherapy sessions. In this article, we examine the circumstances that brought Munch to Jacobson's clinic and his therapies, with particular attention to electrotherapies. In so doing, we hope to provide a more complete picture of Munch's crisis in 1908, his nerve doctor, the rationales for medical electricity and other treatments he endured, and Scandinavian psychiatry at this moment in time.

The foundation by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) of the Salpêtrière School in Paris had an influential role in the development of neurology during the late-nineteenth century. The international aura of Charcot attracted neurologists from all parts of the world. We here present the most representative European, American, and Russian young physicians who learned from Charcot during their tutoring or visit in Paris or Charcot's travels outside France. These include neurologists from Great Britain and Ireland, the United States, Germany and Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Finland, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Romania. Particularly emblematic among the renowned foreign scientists who met and/or learned from Charcot were Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard, who had interactions with Paris University and contributed to the early development of British and American neurological schools; John Hughlings Jackson, who was admired by Charcot and influenced French neurology similarly as Charcot did on British neurology; Silas Weir Mitchell, the pioneer in American neurology; Sigmund Freud, who was trained by Charcot to study patients with hysteria and then, back in Vienna, founded a new discipline called psychoanalysis; Aleksej Yakovlevich Kozhevnikov and almost all the founders of the Russian institutes of neurology who were instructed in Paris; and Georges Marinesco, who established the Romanian school of neurology and did major contributions thanks to his valuable relation with Charcot and French neurology.

In 1908, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch-already famous for The Scream and other paintings showing sickness, despair, and suffering-put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, a nerve doctor in Copenhagen. Jacobson had previously attended some of Jean-Martin Charcot's lectures in Paris, as had Knud Pontoppidan, his mentor. Munch, in turn, had long been showing signs and symptoms of an anxiety disorder and what might have been viewed as neurasthenia or hysteria. Now, he also seemed to be suffering from acute alcoholic toxicity. In this article, we explore Scandinavian psychiatry at the turn of the century; Jacobson and Pontoppidan's connections to Paris; and how some of Munch's treatments, most notably his electrotherapy sessions, related to therapeutics at La Salpêtrière. Additionally, various ways in which Munch learned about French medicine are examined. This material reveals how well-known and influential Charcot and his ideas about disorders of the brain and mind had become at the turn of the century, affecting not just the French physicians but also a world-famous artist and his nerve doctor in Scandinavia.

In the scientific world, Professor Jean-Martin Charcot is known for his contribution to the establishment of the anatomo-clinical method in neurology in Paris at the Salpêtrière hospital. However, media attention in the late 1800s has focused on his work on hysteria. In this article, we aim to review how he has been depicted in two recent French movies: Augustine (2012) and Le Bal des Folles (The Mad Women's Ball) (2021). We will compare his image in those two films to articles at the time of his death and contrast how he is represented in other biographical works. Both in the newspapers and in the movies, Charcot's public lessons and experimental work on hypnosis in hysteria are put forward. The two movies offer a new perspective, as both directors were women, and both movies focus on a woman patient's journey at La Salpêtrière. His depiction remains superficial in Le Bal des Folles, portraying a cold, insensitive, and despotic approach to patients. He plays a more central role in Augustine, in which he develops intimacy with one of his patients and a more human and caring side is displayed, in parallel to his authoritative and meticulous figure. Both movies refer to him as a divine authority, but they also allude to his scientific method. In summary, Charcot's recent representations in cinema add a woman's perspective to life under Charcot at La Salpêtrière, which continues to shape further the image we have of this founder of modern neurology.

Jean-Martin Charcot is considered the founding father of modern neurology. There are many general and specialized biographies about him, the result being that a new text is unexpected or would likely amount to plagiarism. However, part of the duties for Charcot's medical professorship have not, to date, been studied at all. This article will focus on the role of Charcot as a member of doctorate juries and, in particular, as the president of these juries. I have reviewed around 12,500 theses one by one. These were defended at the Paris medical school from 1862, Charcot's first year as an agrégé (assistant professor), to his death in 1893. Among the theses, I have selected all of those that discuss neuropsychiatry in the broadest terms (3,663). I have paid particular attention to all of those for which Charcot was part of the jury. This involves 608 theses. All of the data were entered in a database (Filemaker) to facilitate identifying those theses corresponding to one or more of the criteria. Statistical comparisons were then carried out (Excel spreadsheet). In addition to these results, brief individualized surveys were conducted on theses selected for their representativeness, either for the subject matter (multiple sclerosis, aphasia, tabes, general paralysis, etc.) or for specific criteria (foreigners, women, etc.), but all of the theses were defended before a jury that included Charcot. This makes it possible to track how the areas of study in the medical world changed over time, and particularly those of Charcot. The juries Charcot was obliged to be a part of, without any particular ties to the candidate and/or any involvement in the selection and supervision of the work, must be differentiated from the thesis juries for his students. In the latter case, the thesis subjects were most often linked to Charcot's researches. Providing a thesis subject was motivated, in certain cases, by the desire to disseminate new data in the medical profession, not only by dint of the theses themselves but also through the reports that the medical press published regularly (e.g. the diagnosis of various types of shaking) and through the commercial publication of these data, in some cases with a preface by Charcot. In other cases, the thesis was a step in the long process of developing a theory (hysteria). Or it led to a flowering of new ideas, insufficiently proven, which Charcot would only cover in his Lessons once there was convincing confirmation (amyotrophy). This rich cornucopia gives rise to certain neglected nuggets, as well as works that have entered the classical corpus-for example, the theses of Léopold Ordenstein, Ivan Poumeau, Isaac Bruhl, Albert Gombault, and Pierre Janet.