Jean-Martin Charcot and art: relationship of the "founder of neurology" with various aspects of art

Abstract

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), the "father of neurology" in France and much beyond, was also the man who established academic psychiatry in Paris, differentiating it from clinical alienism. In his teaching, he used artistic representations from previous centuries to illustrate the historical developments of hysteria, mainly with the help of his pupil Paul Richer. Charcot liked to draw portraits (in particular, sketches of colleagues during boring faculty meetings and students' examinations), caricatures of himself and others, church sculptures, landscapes, soldiers, etc. He also used this skill in his clinical and scientific work; he drew histological or anatomic specimens, as well as patients' features and demeanor. His most daring artistic experiments were drawing under the influence of hashish. Charcot's tastes in art were conservative; he displayed no affinity for the avant-gardes of his time, including impressionism, or for contemporary musicians, such as César Franck or Hector Berlioz. Léon Daudet, son of Charcot's former friend and famous writer Alphonse Daudet, described Charcot's home as a pseudo-gothic kitsch accumulation of heteroclite pieces of furniture and materials. However, as Henry Meige wrote a few years after his mentor's death, Charcot the artist remains "inseparable from Charcot the physician."

Keywords: Charcot; fine arts; history of neurology in France; hysteria; literature and music; nineteenth-century society.