The doctored woman

At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris.  However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic advancement which, ironically enough, was to prove feminine in nothing but name.
 
While some women at this time were busy playing Calliope to Europe ’s artists and musicians, swathes of other down-and-outs were falling prey to the disease of the moment, Hysteria. Interred in the notorious L’Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris – a century later Lady Diana Spencer would be taken here in her final moments – hysterics would experience muse-dom from quite a different angle. The female patients were photographed, sketched, pushed before crowds to display their unpredictable, fit-induced contortions, like performers in a sideshow.