Medical Muses
William Leith2 August 2012
Medical Muses
by Asti Hustvedt
(Bloomsbury, £8.99)
Asti Hustvedt has tapped into a deeply fascinating seam of medical history here. This is a study of hysteria in female patients in the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris in the 19th century. Hysteria, she says, was a mystery illness that afflicted lots of women. Its origins were both mental and physical. It was, she says, “at least partly an illness of being a woman in an era that strictly limited female roles”. She compares it to contemporary conditions such as anorexia and self-harming. Her descriptions of patients, and of Jean-Martin Charcot, the doctor who treated them, are peerless.
