“Stop reading and start writing!” said my senior dissertation adviser
on, I think, two occasions. So I did. He was trying to snap me out of the
graduate-student dilemma of being a few years (or sometimes decades) behind in
knowledge of the literature in one’s academic field. Why won’t other scholars
stop publishing, at least until we catch up? One of the hardest lessons of
graduate school is that you cannot read everything—even everything that you “should”
read. When it comes to writing the dissertation, it is better to stop
procrastinating by reading “just one more” book or article that contains someone
else’s position on the subject and articulate your own position. The only time I
relapsed into reading secondary sources was when I needed to know something
factual (e.g. how working-class European families organized meals) or when I wanted
to remind myself about a particular historian’s position, so that I could argue
against it (e.g. that communal kitchens were unpopular and unsuccessful). Three
years later, I had completed, defended, and deposited more than 300 pages of prose on the merging of science and politics in the rationing systems of
World War I-era Germany. And I had stopped reading.
The weekend before graduation, I attended the annual conference of my
professional organization, the American
Association of the History of Medicine. During one of the keynote talks,
which involved “shout-outs” to numerous well-known historians of medicine, I
realized that I had managed to get through a decade of graduate education
without having read some key texts in medical history. Granted, many of these
cover American topics and so are not directly relevant to my own work, but
being a medical humanist in the US, it is easier to talk to one’s clinical colleagues
about our shared national medical history. So I promised myself that I would read one book in the history of medicine every month until I graduate from
medical school. So far that has meant a few pages here and there at night
before falling asleep, and many pages in airports and on planes while traveling
one weekend. Although, now that Dear Husband and I have started preparing for the
32-week-long Disciple I Bible study together at bedtime, I may have to block
off another time when I am not in clinic or studying for exams to recover this
crucial bit of my identity and intellectual life.
In June I read Medical Muses: Hysteria
in Nineteenth-Century Paris, by Asti Hustvedt. Written for the general
reading public, Medical Muses describes
in detail the lives and medical cases of three women made famous at Jean-Martin Charcot’s
psychiatric hospital in Paris: Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève. In the 1870s
and 1880s, Charcot developed a theory of hysteria involving epileptic “fits,”
catatonic poses, hypnotism, promiscuity, confabulation, and insensitivity to
pain. Hustvedt attempts to recover these women’s lives before and after their
incarcerations at the Salpêtrière and to show how they still had some autonomy
over their symptoms and representations, despite the fact that Charcot
literally displayed his favorite patients like circus animals, opening the lecture
hall on Tuesday afternoons for demonstrations of their symptoms. Hysteria was a
leading medical theory until Charcot’s death in 1892, when it was quickly swept
under the rug of medical misadventures. He is still remembered for Charcot-Marie-Tooth
Disease and other neurological and medical phenomena. For someone who is not
trained as a medical historian, Husvedt does an admirable job explaining the
social and medical contexts as well as the various images of the three
beautiful, afflicted women.
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