ABSTRACT
In art and literature, hysteria materialized through the Salpetriere’s photographs of famed hysteric Augustine Gleizes who later played the artistic muse to Surrealists of 1920s’ Paris. By the mid-twentieth century, the glamour the Surrealists found in hysteria had all but disappeared and instead the illness came to allegorically stand in for the topical struggles addressed through the second wave feminist movement. This chapter provides a social history of the Salpetriere, tracing the origins of the asylum from the Great Connement through nineteenth-century hysteria to illustrate the gradual progression. Becoming the Salpetriere In his seminal work, Madness and Civilization Michel Foucault traces a genealogy of ‘madness’ throughout the Classical Age and in turn demysties and perhaps de-romanticizes the concept’s historical origins. Centuries prior to the hysterical epidemic at the Salpetriere, hysteria was already being discovered and chronicled in ancient Greek and Egyptian societies.
