Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Jean-Martin Charcot

  • Imagined conversation: The day Mitchell and Charcot met

    Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States “Professor Charcot, allow me to introduce Mr. Thomas who has travelled to Paris from America in hope that you might assist him with a most troubling malady.” Charcot’s dutiful assistant stepped back and gave a transmitting nod. Charcot returned the gesture with an acknowledging nod. “Of course. Mr. Thomas,…

  • Book review: John Hughlings Jackson: Clinical Neurology, Evolution and Victorian Brain Science

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom John Hughlings Jackson is often considered to be the father of clinical neurology, although his contemporary in France, Jean-Martin Charcot, could also justifiably lay claim to that title. Both men made gigantic contributions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a golden age of clinical neurology in which many…

  • Psychiatric care at the historical Athens Mental Health Facility

    Cherron Payne Farmington, Connecticut, United States   Athens Asylum for the Insane, Athens State Hospital Administration Building, Circa late 19th Century to early 20th Century. Ohio University Archives. When I was an undergraduate student at Ohio University in Athens, my friends and I would often hike to an intriguing place called the Ridges, overlooking the picturesque…

  • Multiple sclerosis: Early descriptions

    JMS Pearce  Hull, England Clinical MS: Augustus D’Este, McKenzie Fig 1. MS plaques, by Robert Carswell. Source It was almost two centuries ago that the best known and possibly the first detailed patient’s description of multiple sclerosis (MS) was recorded. It survives in the diaries (1822-48) and almanac of Sir Augustus D’Este, the Harrovian grandson…

  • John Hughlings Jackson

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. John Hughlings Jackson. Selected writings of John Hughlings Jackson: frontispiece. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). “. . . A man among the little band of whom are Aristotle and Newton and Darwin.”  -Gustave I. Schorstein (1863-1906), physician at the London Hospital   The magnitude…

  • Duchenne de Boulogne

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, England   Fig 1. Duchenne examining facial muscles of expression. [From Mècanisme de la physionomie Humaine (1862)] The eponymous Duchenne muscular dystrophy still provokes a sense of sadness in afflicted families and therapeutic impotence in their medical attendants. Although both Edward Meryon (1852) and Wilhelm Griesinger (1865) published early case reports,…

  • Delusions of being and nothingness

    Jesús Ramírez-Bermúdez Mexico City, Mexico   Emil Cioran and his long-lost friends. Augustin Ramirez Bermudez. Jesus Ramirez Bermudez Private Collection In the late nineteenth century, the French physician Jules Cotard described patients with a delusional denial of bodily organs, self-existence, and the world. The woman originally described “believed that she had no brain, nerves, chest,…

  • Charcot and his “grandes hysteriques”

    Perhaps no other physician in history has been associated with more diseases than Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893). He was one of the greatest neurologists of the 19th century, instrumental in developing the systematic neurological examination based on correlating clinical features observed during life with changes found at autopsy. At the Salpêtrière, the large hospital and asylum…

  • Neurologica – Disorders of the dream world

    Shameemah Abrahams Cape Town   A portrait of the pioneering neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who was well-known for characterizing multiple sclerosis and hysteria. The human mind, so capable of creating works of genius like the orchestral sounds of Beethoven’s symphonies, da Vinci’s enigmatic artwork, or the majestic pyramids of Giza, can easily lose itself and spiral…