TALK SHOW 5
Hosted by Jaime Clarke

Topic: Witness to History

Guests:

Maud Casey is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come and Genealogy, and the short story collection, Drastic. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at the University of Maryland. Visit Maud at www.maudcasey.com.

Myla Goldberg is the author of novels Bee Season and Wickett’s Remedy and the essay collection, Time’s Magpie. Her first illustrated children's book, Catching the Moon, was published this past spring. Visit Myla at www.mylagoldberg.com.

Karl Iagnemma is a roboticist at MIT, and author of the short story collection On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction and the forthcoming novel The Expeditions. Visit Karl at www.karliagnemma.com.

Christopher Sorrentino is the author of Sound on Sound, Trance, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the forthcoming American Tempura, a collaboration with artist Derek Boshier. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, the New York Times, Playboy, and many other publications. He teaches writing at The New School in New York City.


––Name an historical event you wish you would’ve witnessed/participated in and why.

Casey: I would like to drop in Quantum Leap style (or maybe Journeyman is the more current TV reference, though I can only think of the excellent Kevin McKidd as Lucius Vorenus and I keep wondering whether McKidd as the Journeyman will travel back to himself, but I digress...) on much of the middle-to-late part of the 19th century in France to watch the burgeoning psychiatric culture, well, burgeon. More specifically, I would like to attend one of the Tuesday Lessons held by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris and, more specifically still, I’d like to attend the one he gave on February 7, 1888 titled “Hysteroepilepsy: A Young Woman With a Convulsive Attack in the Auditorium.” For those not obsessed with the history of psychiatry, the Tuesday Lessons were the weekly public lectures Charcot gave on various illnesses, though hysteria became a frequent and major subject.

He would hold the lectures in the amphitheater of the hospital and he would have a patient there to, essentially, perform the illness up for discussion. In the transcript of the Feburary 7, 1888 lecture, Charcot writes, “Isn’t there something immoral about waiting and provoking such crises?” This is, in fact, what he goes on to do. He instructs, for example, an intern to touch the woman’s “hysterogenic point,” located conveniently under her left breast, in order to trigger the “epilleptoid phase” of hysterioepilepsy. Then he instructs the intern to compress the woman’s “ovarian region” with an “ovarian compressor belt.” Like so many trailblazers doing really weird things, Charcot kept elaborate records so drawings of an ovarian compressor belt, as well as pictures of women in the Salpetriere amphitheater, in all stages of hysteria and hysterioepilepsy, are easy to find should you care to check it out.

It’s all a bit grim––and my desire to be there may seem akin to wanting to see a bullfight in which the bull is replaced by a mentally ill woman––but the patient’s performance, its freak show aspects aside, is moving to me because it was exactly that, a performance, and as a performance, it was hers to perform. To look at the drawings and photographs of women whom Charcot had assigned this diagnosis is to see women translating their messy, amorphous pain (usually exacerbated by living in the Salpetriere) into something legible.