In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women
institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored
"City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of
female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria--and
the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical
men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical
interest, and haunting lyrical beauty." --Sigrid Nunez, author of
The Friend and What Are You Going Through
"Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?"
wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history's ghosts, marginalized and
dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud
Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These
linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and
medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the
humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined
in Paris's Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by
the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.