by Asti Hustvedt (
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Before she entered Salpêtrière Hospital in 1877, Blanche Wittmann was
just another damaged child from a poor neighborhood of Paris. Raped by
an employer, angry and seizure-prone, the 17-year-old girl almost
inevitably became a charity patient of the hospitals mental wards. Once
there, however, she came to the attention of one of Frances most famous
scientists, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Acclaimed for his work
in diseases of the nervous system (he was the first physician to
recognize that ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was a disease of
motor neurons), Charcot had developed a keen interest in the kind of
neurotic fits exhibited by the teenage Blanche. Under his care
andcritics would claimhis manipulation, she became not just a patient
but a star performer known as the queen of hysterics. As Hustvedt
details in this compassionate history, the doctor not only studied
patients like Blanche, he turned them into public exhibits. Charcot and
his colleagues, experimenting with treatment by hypnosis, often held
theatrical demonstrations of their power over these troubled women: Once
hypnotized, Blanche became a smoothly running woman-machine.... These
performances have led earlier writers to obsess over the circus-tent
nature of the proceedings and the male arrogance of the research. And
Hustvedt does explore those issues as well as Charcots eventual fall
from professional grace. But her real fascination is in turning these
so-called machines into real women, and she tells her story by
deliberately focusing on three very dissimilar patients: the celebrated
and obedient Blanche; a pretty and incurably willful Augustine; and a
religion-crazed, demon-obsessed teenager called Geneviève. They are also
completely alike in being poor, powerless, desperate. Their lives
provide a near shocking contrast to the privileged existence of Charcot,
married into wealth, residing in an ornate mansion on the Boulevard
Saint-Germain. That imbalance is so strong (and wrong) that even today
it overshadows his research into the elusive nature of neurotic
behaviors. Hustvedt comes from a literary family; her sister is novelist
and essayist Siri Hustvedt, her brother-in-law Paul Auster. And she has
worked as both an editor and translator. But this is her first time out
as a book author, and its not surprising to find signs of inexperience
in the work. She struggles with doing justice to the complex nature of
Charcots work; she visibly gropes for a meaningful resolution to her
tale. Still, she does a lovely, sympathetic job of illuminating the lost
lives of the famous hysterics, reminding us that the story of science,
far from being purely clinical, is ever the most human of stories. 40
illus. (May) Reviewed by Deborah Blum. Deborah Blum is author of The
Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz
Age New York. Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information. -- Publisher's Weekly
