Hysteria and hypnotism became a favorite topic of studies in the fin de siècle neurology that emerged from the school organized at La Salpêtrière by Jean-Martin Charcot, where he had arrived in 1861. Georges Gilles de la Tourette started working with Charcot in 1884 and probably remained his most faithful student, even after his mentor's death in 1893. This collaboration was particularly intens...

Bronfen's menacing "knot" is the perennial paradox of mind and body, health and illness, the corporal body and its representations, all of whose antinomies have been annexed to hysteria in our century. 'Hysteria and its discontents', as her Freudian subtitle suggests: the medical malady, human condition, and cultural discourse for which all categories established have been adjudged inadequate. ...