Research Information System
SANAT TARIHI DERGISI-JOURNAL OF ART HISTORY, vol.31, no.1, 2022 (ESCI)
The aim of this article is to reveal the historical origins of the visual image of the hysterical woman, which has spread throughout culture, as well as the reasons for its perseverance. The genealogical method developed by Michel Foucault will be employed to accomplish this. Hippocrates was the first to use the term "hysteria," which literally means "uterus," to describe a female-specific illness. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), a notable French neurologist, connected hysteria with the brain rather than the uterus and established it as a legitimate field of medical research in the 19th century. The spread of the visual image of hysteria began with the use of photography in 19th century medical practices as well. The idea that photography has the capacity to see and show "truths" that the human eye cannot see, which has been embraced with great enthusiasm by the positivist understanding of science, has brought with its use for institutional arrangement and archiving, as well as classification of people according to their types, since the first half of the 19th century. Classifying and archiving people through images is a modern technique that can be considered alongside Foucault's conceptions of power and discipline, because these techniques are used to discipline the body and create "docile bodies." Psychiatrists and neurologists who adopted a positivist approach to photography, viewing it as a direct replica of the reality, utilized photography to give proof for hysteria, which they considered as an invisible pathology. The images taken at the Salpetriere Hospital under the guidance of Charcot are the most prominent illustrations of this approach. Charcot, who worked at Salpetriere Hospital for almost 30 years and believed that photography was essential for observation, formed a photographic section here and employed photography to capture the stages of hysteria. In Foucault's terminology, knowledge and discursive framework for hysteria was developed in the 19th century clinical dispositif with the employment of the camera in the guise of scientific inquiry at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. In this article, it is claimed that another constituent element of this frame is the artistic images that circulate simultaneously with or precede these photographs. Therefore, in this article, portraits of mad women by Theodore Gericault, Ophelia (1851-1852) by John Everett Millais, Pinel a la Salpetriere (1876) by Tony Robert-Fleury, Une lecon clinique a la Salpetriere by Andre Brouillet (1887) and the images of "the woman with the devil" or "the witch" included in the Les Demoniaques dans l'art (1887) book by Charcot and Richer will be discussed in relation to the photographs produced in Salpetriere.