John De-Falbe

Radium and the nature of love

issue 21 October 2006

For 16 years, from 1878, Blanche Wittman was a patient in the infamous Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, diagnosed by the famous Dr Charcot as a hysteric. Putting Blanche on display in a cataleptic state, Charcot explained to audiences that he hoped to reveal, through her ‘a certain system, a secret code, which … could point the way to the meaning of life’. He was no quack (he was the first person to identify multiple sclerosis); Freud was his assistant for a time; and Blanche not only admired him but also, it appears, loved him, and the love was returned.

After leaving the hospital, Blanche was taken on by Marie Curie as an assistant to work in the Paris laboratory where, in 1898, radium was discovered. She suffered a series of amputations so that by her death in 1913 she was a one-armed torso in a wooden box, writing in notebooks about the nature of love.

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