––Name a player in the historical event whose motives aren’t clear and speculate about what the motives might be.

Casey: Everyone’s motives are murky here. Charcot’s, the patient’s, and the audience. My own desire to crash this wacked-out party. The Tuesday lessons were spectacle as much as science, a freak show like any other. Come see the woman cower in a corner! Come see the woman arch her back! Come hear her beg for her mother! Charcot’s lectures and these live experiments with patients were about the emerging field of neurology, about scientific discovery and inquiry, about Charcot’s career (not surprisingly, his focus on hysteria has overshadowed a lot of the genuine progress he made) and his increasingly rotund ego. It’s unclear who this “young woman with the convulsive attack in the auditorium” was before she was that, but it’s likely her life was pretty rough at the overcrowded, unsanitary Salpetriere. Was this moment “onstage” a small moment of relief? Of rare attention? When I read the stages of hysterioepilepsy Charcot induces, I imagine someone dancing faster and faster on a table as the applause grows louder and the crowd in the bar shouts for more. I’d like to see her face—not her photographed face or her drawn face, her actual face. Charcot wants something from her and she’s providing it. Is she getting something in return? At another point, she says, “Oh! Mother.”

Goldberg: While Edison’s true motives weren’t general knowledge at the time, they were certainly clear to anyone working with him. I wish I could interview Topsy. She was executed after killing three of her handlers in three years. Considering that the last of these guys, J.F. Blount, had tried to feed her a lit cigarette, I suspect that the previous two were equally enlightened in their behavior toward animals. After J.F. tried to pass off his cigarette as a peanut, Topsy picked him up with her trunk and then threw him to the ground, killing him instantly. She didn’t run at him or knock him over; she did something much more deliberate. I love that. And I wish I could take her to a peanut bar, treat her to a pound of salted, and talk with her about it.

Iagnemma: Most historians seem to agree that Meriwether Lewis committed suicide in 1809, three years after the expedition’s conclusion, but there are still some who suggest that he might have been murdered. Lewis was a depressive, who had previously attempted suicide, but he left no clue about what happened that last night. Some commentators seem amazed that a man so rugged and accomplished could have committed suicide; but of course accomplishments don’t mean anything to a person suffering from depression. Lewis was probably just exhausted by life.

Sorrentino: Wouldn’t it be nice, or at least vaguely hopeful, if our current situation were rife with ambiguity, ironic Sophoclean trials of character, and Shakespearean doubt and uncertainty?


––If you could affect the outcome of the historical event, what would be different?

Casey: Though I know it’s against all the Quantum Leap, Journeyman, Back to the Future rules, ideally I’d like to rescue the young woman from a life of misery, bring her into the future where she could cast off the ovarian compressor belt and take a warm bath and some Valium. Though—and this is why I’m interested in this particular event to begin with—the impulse to diagnose is as potent here in the 21st century as it was in its nascent form back then. Who knows what kind of too-tight sweater her messy story would be stuffed into now? In Freud’s obituary of Charcot in 1893, he described him as Adam, the great namer of things. You, my dear crazy lady, are an hysteric. There’s a label to contain you and your wild contortions. A similar yearning exists these days to contain the wild, mysterious mish-mash of emotion, experience, neuroscience, to name it. And the flip side: to be contained, to be named.

Goldberg: I wish I could have been a small voice in the crowd watching Topsy go down. I wish I could have said, “You know why Edison’s making a big deal out of using alternating current to kill off this beautiful elephant? Because he didn’t invent it: his former employee, Nikola Tesla, did. Edison stiffed Tesla out of a $50,000 bonus for completely redesigning the company’s generators and then refused him a raise. Edison wants you to think that Tesla’s alternating current is dangerous so that you’ll continue using direct current, which is his much lamer invention.”