694 'J^HE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in utter disorder previous to him." His chief work was his 

 study of nervous diseases. For years his lectures in the Salpe- 

 trifere on neurosis, hypnotism, and the different forms of hysteria 

 attracted universal attention. In no official chair had the attempt 

 been hazarded to take up the study of that series of occult phe- 

 nomena which have excited public curiosity and baffled the sa- 

 gacity of observers from ancient times. Charcot subjected these 

 strange phenomena to the precise examination of the experiment- 

 al method. He studied them with keen vision, so as to be able 

 to reproduce them at will, and often revealed the existence of ex- 

 traordinary facts which had been before regarded as chimerical. 

 Although his conclusions may sometimes transcend the limits of 

 scientific rigor, it is nevertheless true that he cast a new light on 

 a whole region of investigation hitherto concealed in the dark. 

 Besides making new medical discoveries in this line of research, 

 he opened fresh horizons to science, initiated many pupils, and 

 founded a new school, widely known now as the School of the 

 Salpetri^re. 



In connection with the Salpetri^re he founded a laboratory, an 

 anatomo-pathological museum, electro-therapeutic wards, and a 

 photographic studio, where he pictured sections of diseased brains 

 and spinal cords, and formed a collection of portraits of neuro- 

 pathic patients. 



In his studies of gout and the maladies arising from it, to 

 which he gave great attention in the early years of his practice, 

 he discovered relations between disorders which had till then 

 been thought independent of one another. He traced certain 

 kinds of deafness, arthritic rheumatism, and kidney disease to 

 gout, and found the origin of that disease in an overwrought liver 

 and a sluggish skin. Pulmonary diseases also engaged his atten- 

 tion. In his lectures on phthisis he held that all caseation is 

 essentially a tuberculous process, and assigned a secondary place 

 to pneumonic phenomena. 



Having been born at the time of the reaction in favor of 

 clericalism, which was encouraged by the devotedly Catholic 

 court of Charles X, and intensified the disgust of the freethink- 

 ing people of Paris, Charcot grew up with a strong tendency 

 toward extreme heterodoxy. He delighted later in life in demol- 

 ishing the fetiches set up by the priests with which his investi- 

 gations brought him in contact ; and as Mrs. Crawford says, in 

 the London Illustrated News, " humored the irreligious people in 

 power by reducing the Lourdes and other miracles to suggestion. 

 Gambetta, Naquet, Paul Bert, and other political atheists at- 

 tended his lectures. He produced the phenomena of stigmates on 

 hysterical girls.*' In like manner he pointed out analogies in 

 other forms and manifestations of hysteria or hypnotism with 



