PROLOGUE

Framed from a close distance, in aged monochrome: a woman, petrified in paroxysm, seated upright upon an iron hospital bed, etched against a black background. Her face is angled to catch the light, her back is arched, and hands are raised. She is dressed in a timeless white hospital gown, which has slipped off one shoulder and rests on her breast. She is otherwise unadorned. The photograph is labeled “Ecstasy,” but the woman’s euphoria is spiritual, not libidinous; something is absolving her of great pain, if only momentarily. She gazes upward, beaming, like a woman who only has eyes for God. Either she is indifferent to being watched or she takes pleasure in it: she has to be captured. The phantoms of the image are not shown: just outside the frame is Doctor Charcot, with whom all healing starts. Perhaps her semiconscious gestures are borrowed, and if she is sensual, it is because she has been made so under his watchful eye. It may be that Charcot is instructing her in her bodily adjustments, rehearsing the physical manifestations of hysteria, the name he has given her symptoms, organic and provoked. Her virtuousness fissures slightly—a little thrill of self-importance, an oversight—as she, his favorite case, presents her body to him, to medicine. Charcot gives the signal—a snap of his fingers or a wave of his hand—and the woman loses hold of something. She sits up, confused. Everything is slipping away, everything that the photograph will later contain escapes her, and she is only a frightened girl, hair and arms in disarray, sitting in a hospital bed. It is as if she has abruptly realized she has been living an incorrect life. Charcot wants to cure the woman of her sickness, but it is already too late. The picture of a symptom, a medical riddle, is the form her life has taken.