An 1887 painting by André Brouillet called A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière is the best-known visual rendering of hysteria. Before the viewer has time to analyze it, to speak of color or form or style, their gaze is drawn to Blanche Wittman, dipped back into a swoon, semiconscious and semi-undressed. She is hypnotized by Doctor Charcot, who is giving a medical demonstration to a window-lit audience of about thirty men. Many of whom, such as the neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, can be identified by name and profession. Doctors, artists, writers, and politicians attended Charcot’s famed lectures, which served as the model for the modern teaching hospital. The scene depicted in the painting, appreciated by crowds at a salon hosted by the Académie des Beaux-Arts for its large canvas and overt sexuality, foretold the birth of psychoanalysis and expressed the spirit of neurology and psychology. In the painting, Charcot’s gaze is out toward his audience: he is the only one not watching Blanche.

Professors Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell write, “To understand this one painting is to understand everything that went wrong in the modern concept of mind and brain. It portrays nothing less than the original sin of neurology and psychiatry, one from which we are still trying to recover.”