If we are to accuse hysterics of imitation or susceptibility to suggestion, we ought to be sure of what it is they might have been imitating. Dance scholars often highlight the similarities between the movements of hysteria, epilepsy, and catalepsy and the seemingly automatic, involuntary movement’s symbolic representation of the body’s triumph over reason, bringing with it a fundamental lack of control. Whether the dancer or hysteric identifies with her movements or mimics those of others is not clear; nor is the difference between the two.

The era in which Charcot worked marked a turn after which behaviors formerly thought of as religious expression were recast as symptoms of illness, though Charcot’s obtrusively visual diagnostic process certainly reinforced the casual association of hysteria with mysticism. He confidently proclaimed as hysterics women previously thought to be possessed by demons (or, occasionally, canonized as saints). Just before his death, he published a paper on “Faith-Healing” in which he diagnosed Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Ávila as “undeniable hysterics,” and in Les Démoniaques dans l’art (1886), a collaboration with graphic artist Paul Richer, he reinterprets a series of illustrations depicting demonic possession and religious ecstasy as portraying symptoms of hysteria. Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer, who dubbed Teresa of Ávila the “patron saint of hysterics,” observed that hysteria patients’ poses often seemed to be modeled on depictions of Teresa. Self-starvation and mutilation of the flesh, even when carried out by a religious patient professing penance, were relegated to the list of hysterical symptoms. In a sense, the medical world sought to “save” the women in a capacity formerly left to the Church, a practice largely perpetuated by the assertion that hysteria was a purely biological disease. In a short story by Guy de Maupassant (who had viewed Charcot’s Tuesday lectures at the hospital), a character airs their grievance: “[Charcot] has set forth some nervous phenomena which are unexplained and inexplicable; he makes his way into that unknown region which men explore every day, and not being able to comprehend what he sees, he remembers perhaps too well the explanations of certain mysteries given by priests.” By 1883, the beds in the Salpêtrière, previously named after saints, had been renamed after scientists. But the women treated there were still sick.

Many suggest that the hysterics chose life at the Salpêtrière for reasons similar to their predecessors who chose convent life: because it was a more tolerable existence, a respectable alternative to marriage. When Teresa of Ávila entered a Carmelite convent just outside the city’s walls in 1535, her decision to do so was somewhat informed by her desire not to marry and be stuck at home as her mother had been. The Convent of the Incarnation was likely a better place to endure the countless symptoms she might have experienced in the outside world: the rules were fairly relaxed and the sisters wore elegant habits; lived in large, comfortable rooms; and received guests regularly.

In the convent or the hospital, hysterics and mystics found a place where their symptoms were received and given a framework in which to be interpreted. When Teresa was nearly forty and finding it difficult to pray, she experienced what she believed to be a mystical union with God before an image of a wounded Christ, “that He was within me, or that I was totally engulfed by Him.” She devoted herself to a theology of mysticism and asceticism informed by similar episodes, which occurred constantly thereafter. Most curiously, it is in this state of rapture that she experienced healing from her symptoms—or, at least, the symptoms she considered to be the result of illness. She wrote prolifically during this period of her life, and her resulting autobiography has also come to be read as an exceptionally rare and detailed medical record of the time.

In Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun wrote, “A pandemic similar to the one we see today among Young-Girls emerged at the heart of the Middle Ages among the saints. Against the world that would reduce her to her body, the Young-Girl opposes her sovereignty over her body. In the same way, the saint opposed the patriarchal mediation of the clergy to her own direct communion with God; she opposed the dependency through which THEY would have liked to keep her to her radical independence from the world.”

Long after their bodies are lost to history, we never stop obsessively trying to diagnose these women in our time’s language. When the diagnosis of hysteria was no longer considered viable, secular historians reinterpreted Teresa’s symptoms as likely to have been caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. Others levy a diagnosis against all these women like a condemnation: dramatic imitation or mass psychogenic illness. Elaine Showalter writes that hysteria imitates “culturally permissible expressions of distress” and that, over time, these articulations have changed with the cultures surrounding them into epidemics believed to be psychogenic, like chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, multiple personality disorder, and satanic ritual abuse. But, reading Teresa’s autobiography as a teen, I did not know this, nor had I formed a healthy skepticism about the historical evolution of diagnostics, what diagnostics are for. I did not think about the likelihood that Teresa had suffered from an unknowable combination of organic illness, religious ecstasy, and revolt against circumstance. I simply believed that she experienced her illness as she said she did: God roused her soul, and the suppression of basic physical urges corresponded with the relief of symptoms, so she could be unified in rapture with God. It felt important to believe what a woman had said about her own life.

Another patient of Charcot’s, the French novelist Alphonse Daudet, wrote, at the beginning of notes on his disintegration from syphilis, a common Greek tag that translates to “Suffering is instructive.” Daudet observed his fellow sufferers at Lamalou, a thermal station in southern France preferred by those recovering from (or sinking farther into) syphilitic illness. (The discovery that neurosyphilis had a physical basis had fueled Charcot’s belief that other forms of mental illness and “abnormal” behavior would eventually be explained by brain pathology.) Many Lamalou syphilitics were farther along in their illness than Daudet, who used his observations of their symptoms to predict how he might fare himself. His friend Edmond de Goncourt wrote in July 1880, “Poor Daudet, who is haunted by an idée fixe: the fear of degradation, and the physical shame which paralysis entails. And when you try to reassure him, he tells you that he has studied the progression of his disease among his fellow-sufferers at Lamalou: he knows what will happen to him next year, and what will happen to him the year after.” Most chronically ill people don’t have such specimen comrades to help predict how they might fare.