On Hysteria by Sabine Arnaud;

Author:Sabine Arnaud; [Arnaud, Sabine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226275680
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-08-20T05:00:00+00:00

The patient cannot speak. The doctor moves from the narrative of the public execution to that of the body’s self-condemnation. He starts with the description of the hanging even though he only saw his patient for the first time a few days later, and bases his analysis on testimonies concerning the patient’s emotional life, not on the relationships or interactions between her organs or on her temperament. The narration presents everything in chronological order rather than beginning with the description of the body. Calvet proceeds to the description of symptoms only once he has presented his interpretation: an effect of the imagination. The observation is not, this time, about the deleterious effect of reading on the imagination, since it concerns a woman a priori shielded from such excess: a woman from the lower classes, married, with regular menses, not pregnant.

The body here becomes a mirror, and by miming suffering it becomes a body of suffering. “The prodigious effects of the imagination” consist in the transformation of the body effected by a mere sight. Seeing becomes feeling; seeing marks the body; seeing a condemnation is condemnation of the body to feel again and again; seeing is epidemic. The identification plays from woman to woman, from body to body, from spectacle to spectacle. The condemned and disarmed body becomes a disarming body, which the narrative localizes as the origin of the fits. Calvet sends this observation less to vindicate his treatment than to signal the effect of imagination, to indicate to physicians what they must take into account in their practice, and to insist on the need to further elucidate its powers. He complements his classic prescription with moral resources, acting first in the struggle against the symptoms and then in the identification of the pathology’s origin. The imagination is constructed as a faculty that takes and gives all shapes and thus lends itself to all interpretations. The body and the imagination appear in a relationship of complete reciprocity, reacting to each other and staging all those reactions. Calvet’s interpretation does not try to enforce specific therapeutic responses but instead to participate in the production of knowledge by gathering cases, seen as a step outside of abstract systems, in pursuit of an experience-based knowledge.

The physiological effects of emotion mobilized physicians’ curiosity, and they hastened to send all kind of reports to academies of medicine communicating the violence of their cases. In 1777, Monsieur Denis, prison doctor in the town of Douai, sent the SRM an “observation on the cure of a universal spasm caused by fear”:75

The named Thérèse, daughter of the Campabem, aged 22, who for 5 years has been in domestic service, fled from her master’s house early in the morning and went to town, where she was arrested on suspicion of the domestic theft that had occurred at the home of this bourgeois the night before her flight. When she was arrested, she was found in possession of a purse with money far beyond her estate, which led to the pronouncement, imprudently aloud, in her presence that she would soon be hanged.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.