BACK in the 1970s when I was studying psychology, one of the most exciting events for us students was the 鈥渄emonstration鈥� of patients at the Warneford, Oxford鈥檚 famous psychiatric hospital. Picture the scene. An elegant shrink introducing a procession of stand-up tragics. Schizophrenics with amazing visions, depressives, and a well-dressed but pushy toff glad to tell us he鈥檇 done well in the market and he was having a fling with next door. A classic manic, the head shrink explained.
Needless to say, he never asked if they minded having their trauma so cruelly exhibited. Such theatrical demonstrations started in the 1880s at the Salp锚tri猫re Hospital in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot paraded鈥攁nd photographed鈥攈is patients every week. The audience included Sigmund Freud and Giles de la Tourette, the man who identified the syndrome.
Thirty years on from the Warneford, I鈥檓 in Charcot鈥檚 library at the Salp锚tri猫re, helping my ex-wife Aileen La Tourette research a novel about her namesake. When Charcot died, the hospital moved all his books and bookshelves from his home to the hospital. The walls are covered with evocative old photographs: patients in dramatic poses, limbs contorted, the 鈥渕ad鈥� frozen in their madness. Therapy as music hall.
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The jovial librarian rushes in all excited with a police file from 1894. It turns out to be an interestingly modern tale. Nearly all the patients Charcot exhibited were women, among them 30-year-old Suzanne Kemper. Now, from the earliest days of psychiatry, there had been worries about the possibility of erotic attachments between doctors and the women they were treating. In the mid-1880s, for example, Freud鈥檚 mentor Josef Breuer fled Vienna when one of his patients, Anna O, claimed to be pregnant by him.
Kemper is not as famous as Anna O, yet her story is far more dramatic. In 1894, she walked into Tourette鈥檚 consulting room. She explained that her life had been ruined by what had happened to her at the hospital. She blamed the doctors, especially Charcot.
Tourette, Charcot鈥檚 main assistant, later told the police that he had tried to reassure the hysterical woman but failed. After a few minutes, an increasingly angry Kemper pulled a gun and shot three times. One bullet got him in the shoulder. I鈥檇 love to say that the other two lodged in the analytic couch, but in 1894 Freud had yet to invent analysis鈥攁nd the two slugs merely missed.
The police arrested Kemper within hours. She did not resist. The file says she claimed to have been 鈥渞uined鈥� at the hospital鈥攊n that very specific Victorian sense of the word. She wanted to tell her story, but failed to find a protoype Maigret or Morse to listen to her tale about the Salp锚tri猫re. After all, the woman was mad and Tourette was a brilliant doctor working for a hero of medicine. Her claims were never investigated and she was convicted and sent to jail. But she did get some revenge. Tourette was never the same after the attack. His wound was not too bad but he went into a terminal depression.
Since I went to the library, Jeffrey Masson, who made such a big splash with his book attacking the power imbalance in therapy, has announced a new book on the secret life of pigs. Even if his focus is now swine not shrinks, he would love this tale of patient revenge鈥攅specially since it seems typical of psychiatry to leave it buried deep in the archives.