Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital

It would be a miracle.

So for years before the revolution, she was held in the Salpêtrière Hospital.

She was let out.

She's now been hanging around in the Latin Quarter, and she's been saying that she is about to give birth to a new Messiah, and that Robespierre is his prophet.

And this sets the stage for a really monumental clash in medical history.

We are moving to Paris, to the Salpêtrière Hospital, to witness the showdown between Jean-Martin Charcot and Joseph Babinski.

This is such a pivotal moment.

So in the late 1800s, the presentation of somatization had culturally shaped itself into dramatic motor hysteria.

He defined hysteria simply as any symptom that could be induced by suggestion, and just as importantly, eliminated by persuasion.

And his objective clinical approach completely dismantled Charcot's empire.

Within a decade, the grand thrashing fits of the Salpêtrière practically vanished from the medical literature.

But the underlying human distress didn't vanish, did it?

Charcot, who is a very famous French neurologist, he looms large in the history of neurology and psychology more broadly, having made important contributions to the study, not just of ALS, but also multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, hysteria, whoops- Whoops ... epilepsy, Tourette syndrome, and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, among others.

And he spent his career at the Salpetriere Hospital, which was a charity hospital that became famous, thanks to Charcot, for the study of neurological and psychological conditions, which it was not yet a divided field necessarily.

Mm-hmm.

Thousands of patients passed through these hospital doors, giving Charcot ample opportunity to observe and take note of patterns that could signify a new undescribed disease, and his approach was kind of revolutionary for the time, right? It involved linking symptoms to pathology.

The theory of suggestion is maintained by the medical school attached to the hospital at Nancy.

The theory of neurosis was originally put forth as the result of experiments by Dr. Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, which is now the co-called Salpêtrière School, that is, the medical school connected with the Salpêtrière Hospital.

There is also another theory put forth, or rather a modification of Professor Charcot's theory, and maintained by the School of the Charity Hospital in Paris, headed by Dr. Luis, to the effect that the physical magnet and electricity may affect persons in the hypnotic state, and that certain drugs in sealed tubes placed upon the patient's neck during the condition of hypnosis will produce the same effects which those drugs would produce if taken internally, or as the nature of the drugs would seem to call for if imbibed in a more complete fashion.

This school, however, has been considerably discredited, and Dr. Luis' conclusions are not received by scientific students of hypnotism.

We have just given some of the amusing experiments that may be performed with subjects in one of the minor stages of hypnotism.

But there are other stages which give entirely different manifestations.

For a scientific classification of these, we are indebted to Professor Charcot of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, to whom, next to Mesmer and Braid, we are indebted for the present science of hypnotism.

He recognized three distinct stages, lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism.

The fixed position lasts only a few minutes, however, when the subject returns to a position of relaxation, or drops back into the lethargic state.

If the muscles, nerves, or tendons are rubbed or pressed— paralysis may be produced which however is quickly removed by the use of electricity when the patient awakes by manipulating the muscles the most rigid contraction may be produced until the entire body is in such a state of corpse-like rigidity that a most startling experiment is possible the subject may be placed with his head upon the back of one chair and his heels on the back of another and a heavy man may sit upon him without seemingly producing any effect or even heavy rock may be broken on the subject's body Messieurs Binet and Ferre, pupils of the Salpêtrière school, describe the action of magnets on cataleptic subjects as follows.

The patient is seated near a table on which a magnet has been placed.

The left elbow rests on the arm of the chair, the forearm and hand vertically upraised with thumb and index finger extended, while the other fingers remain half bent.

Afterward we hope to pass on to the phenomena of suggestion and of lucidity.

Professors have demonstrated these things upon women at Nancy and at Salpetriere.

It will be more convincing when a woman demonstrates it upon a professor, with a second professor as a witness.

And that I should be the subject.

Naturally, Pinel's success gained a lot of attention.

Over the course of just two years, he completely changed Bicêtre, and as a consequence, he was asked to move to the Hospice de la Salpêtrière as chief physician in the hope that his methods would be similarly successful there.

Salpêtrière was a much larger project.

Bicêtre had about a thousand patients when he arrived there, and Salpêtrière had eight thousand.

Additionally, Salpêtrière was a women's facility.

This was the last job that he would ever had, not because he died especially young, but because he decided to devote the rest of his career to treating patients there.

And during his time at Salpêtrière, Pinel refined the treatments that he had used at the men's facility and further developed his two-pronged approach, one focusing on their physical well-being and the other on their mental well-being.

On the physical side, it included the same sort of things, hygiene standards for the facility, regular hygiene for the patients themselves, and careful management of their diet.