SKETCH OF JEAN MARTIN CHARCOT. 693 



SKETCH OF JEAN MARTIN CHARCOT. 



A GREAT deal has been added to our knowledge of nervous 

 disease by the labors of Charcot ; and extensive fields of 

 investigation hitherto untried have been opened by him. 



Jean Martin Charcot was born in Paris, France, November 

 29, 1825, and died near Chateau Chinon, le Morvan, France, whither 

 he had gone on a pleasure trip with a few friends, in August, 1893. 

 He was industrious in his youth, acquitted himself brilliantly in 

 his classical studies, and, when the time came for choosing his 

 profession, hesitated whether to become an artist or a doctor. 

 Against the latter was the expense of preparing for the profes- 

 sion, but, encouraged by the assurances of his father, who pre- 

 ferred that line, he began the study in 1845. He became clief de 

 clinique in 1853, and obtained his degree in 1854. Having ob- 

 tained several prizes, by which attention was drawn to him, he 

 became a hospital physician in 1856, an adjunct professor in the 

 University of Paris in 1860, and was appointed physician at the 

 hospital of La Salpetri^re in 1862. Here he spent the remainder 

 of his active life, and prosecuted the researches which have made 

 his name famous throughout Europe and America. " In order," 

 the Lancet says, "properly to appreciate the ability which he 

 brought to bear upon his work and the enthusiasm which he 

 could inspire it should be remembered that when he began his 

 now well-known Legons at the Salpetriere the institution was 

 little less than an ill-assorted collection of five thousand women, 

 comprising the aged, the imbecile, the idiotic, the epileptic, and 

 the paralyzed, in which scarcely an attempt had been made to 

 extract from the wealth of material anything more than a nar- 

 row individual experience. In a few years it had been trans- 

 formed into the very Mecca of neurologists, and this it has re- 

 mained up to the present time." Besides teaching in his clinic at 

 the Salpetriere, Charcot conducted an external course in pathology 

 at the Ecole pratique. He was given the chair of Pathological 

 Anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris in 1875, and filled 

 it till 1883. Since 1877 he elucidated with a rare clearness of 

 vision a large number of questions relating to diseases of the 

 liver, kidney, and spinal marrow. He enriched physiology by 

 contributing to the celebrated theory of cerebral localizations. 

 All his studies have borne fruit ; they touch a multitude of prob- 

 lems of cerebral pathology or of nervous affections, and have 

 been fertile in practical results, especially as concerns locomotor 

 ataxia, medullary perturbations, aphasia, hysteria, and epilepsy. 

 As Dr. G. Daremburg observes in a notice of him, " He brought 

 order and precision into a multitude of questions which were 



