Médecine Rétrospective

Neurology emerged as a transdisciplinary field of research, allying iconographic collage, clinical experimentation, performative re-enactment, narrative, and historiography. Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris engaged in what they called ‘retrospective medicine’, an archival exercise that involved compiling images from the past depicting convulsive gestures that represented, they thought, hysteria, epilepsy, and ‘hysteroepilepsy’, a theatrical form of acting out they considered stemmed from the patient’s imagination. From the Convulsionaries of Saint-Médard to maenads on Greek vase paintings and ecstatic figures depicted in religious frescoes, Charcot and his collaborators collected artefacts resembling their patients’ dance-like gestures: arches of the back and other attitudes passionnelles re-enacted on the lecture-hall stage. This exuberant comparativism, and iconographic excavation, paved the way for ethnographic fieldwork (and eventually anthropology), as one neurology student took it into his hands to visit the reportedly still living remains of choreomania in a nearby dancing procession.