ABSTRACT
On 6 May 1877, Blanche Wittman, a young girl of fifteen entered the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris to work as a nurse and to receive treatment from the great neurologist Charcot. Her background was common to many of the great French hysterics of the 1870s. She was the eldest of nine children of whom only four made it into adulthood. Her father went mad and ended his days in an insane asylum. At two years of age Blanche experienced convulsions, paralysis, mutism and deafness. 'She was undoubtedly nervously tainted from birth, Charcot and his followers thought when they collected her history' (Drinka, 1984: I 23). Her childhood and adolescence up to entering the Salpetriere was a tale of poverty and of threatened, if not actual, sexual abuse at the hands of her employer. And although Marceline, Genevieve and Louise had a certain fascination and greater photogenic qualities, it was Blanche who turned out to be a real 'find' for Charcot. It is she who is depicted fainting into the arms of the master in the famous painting 'A Clinical Lesson of Dr Charcot at the Salpetriere'. She was the star hysteric of the Salpetriere.
