Jean-Martin Charcot

French neurologist (1825–1893), the physician who turned the Salpêtrière in Paris — a vast asylum holding thousands of destitute and chronically ill women — into the leading centre of neurology in Europe, and who was named to the first chair of diseases of the nervous system in 1882. His clinical method was anatomo-clinical: he watched a patient for years, correlated the signs he had recorded with what the autopsy showed, and in this way described or delimited multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (still called Charcot's disease), the neuropathy that bears his name with Marie and Tooth, and the joint destruction of tabes dorsalis.

From the 1870s he turned to hysteria, then a diagnostic wastebasket, and argued two things that were unpopular in different directions: that it had a real basis in the nervous system rather than in the uterus or in bad character, and that it occurred in men as well as in women. His Tuesday lectures at the Salpêtrière became a public event, attended by writers, actors and physicians from across Europe, in which patients were hypnotised and their attacks staged before the audience — a practice that made him famous and that later criticism, above all from Bernheim and the Nancy school, showed to be shot through with suggestion: the patients had learned what was expected of them.

He was nonetheless the teacher of an extraordinary generation: Pierre Janet, Joseph Babinski, Gilles de la Tourette, Alfred Binet, and the young Sigmund Freud, who spent the winter of 1885–86 in Paris, translated him into German and named his eldest son after him. His Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux and the photographic Iconographie of the Salpêtrière remain the documents of a moment when neurology and the study of the mind had not yet parted company.