Hysteria was considered to be a highly complex condition: It was generally thought of as a mental disorder accompanied by physical symptoms such as fits. Historian Lisa Appignanesi writes in her 2007 book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors that in Charcot’s France, the term “described a sexualized madness full of contradictions, one which could play all feminine parts and take on a dizzying variety of symptoms, though none of them had any real detectable base in the body.” (Charcot admitted that men also suffered from hysteria, but he argued that these cases were generally caused by traumatic accidents, rather than by a gendered predisposition.)
Charcot’s research was made famous through the ailing individuals who lived at La Salpêtrière and whose symptoms were displayed and analyzed in sessions open to members of the public. Charcot became a celebrity doctor, turning his semi-staged diagnostic sessions into spectacles for (masculine) public consumption. The methods of diagnosis and treatment at La Salpêtrière were all highly visual, creating a sort of theater of hysteria, in which the often young and pretty “hysterics” acted out their symptoms as if by rote.
One of Charcot’s innovations was to set up a photography studio at La Salpêtrière in order to document the physical symptoms of his patients, such as the dramatic and beautiful Augustine. These images were then widely disseminated in Paul Regnard and Désiré Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière (1876–80), an influential book of medical photography. Presented as a scientifically accurate visual document, the book had a twofold effect: For male readers, it provided a visual record of the attractive and often scantily clad hysterics, while for some female consumers, it became a manual of hysteria and its symptoms to be mimicked, reinforcing the stereotypes associated with the condition.