You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In 1928 the French poet Andre Breton, who had studied to become a psychiatrist, published photographs of a young woman whose gaze was suggestive of both religious and sexual ecstasy. The journal came to be called La Revolution Surrealiste and these photographs, drawn from a massive archive of similar images (whose significance had been dismissed by Breton's teacher Joseph Babinski) were intended by Breton to celebrate the “fiftieth anniversary of hysteria.”
The subject of the photos, Augustine Gleizes, if she ever knew of their publication, would have been 67 at the time, but no one knew of her whereabouts. The photos had been taken 30 years before in the Hospital Salpetriere in Paris, from which Augustine, whose symptoms were beginning to disappear (according to her doctor, Désiré-Magloire Bourneville), had escaped disguised as a man.
By publishing her photograph alongside the poetry of Paul Eluard and the images of Salvador Dali and Andre Masson, Breton was restoring to Augustine the role that she had played at Salpetriere, once more anointing the hysteric as Muse. Prior to becoming the Muse of surrealist poets, the hysterics of Salpetriere, as Asti Hustvedt shows in her intellectually exciting and very moving new book, had been “Medical Muses” who had inspired J.-M. Charcot in his construction and documentation of an illness that fascinated the 19th-century public-Hysteria.
Hustvedt, a scholar of 19th-century French literature and society, has organized her book around three remarkable women, whom she has rightly restored to their important place in the history of psychiatry: Blanche Wittman, Genevieve Legrand, and Augustine Gleizes. Up to this point they have existed largely as visual images, part of an extensive photographic archive that documented their gestures, facial expressions, and physical poses as they passed through attacks of hysterical convulsions. Hustvedt has given an account of their life stories based on the oral testimony they gave when they were a