Book Review: Natasha Ruiz-Gomez, Pathology and Visual Culture
Andrew Graciano2024, Social History of Medicine
https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae072Dr Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Essex, has authored a fascinating and important book that contributes to the histories of art and science, as well as to the medical humanities. Her deep, close investigation of archival sources reconsiders Dr Jean-Martin Charcot and fellow luminaries at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, including the near-forgotten numerous albums of visual material collected, sometimes created, and idiosyncratically curated by Charcot himself. It is not a biography of Charcot, nor is it merely about him. Ruiz-Gómez is clear that the book shines a light on Charcot's students and colleagues at Salpêtrière as 'savants-artistes' who created 'scientific artworks' as part of their neurological research-artworks that were simultaneously informed by and influential on contemporary artistic production. The introduction identifies Charcot as a scientific celebrity, a figure of public renown whose name appears prominently in popular periodicals of the time. She reviews Charcot scholarship of the last decade, arguing that, while rightly celebrated for his neuroscience work, his role as mentor and leader of the group of core clinicians at Salpêtrière and their work have been little considered, particularly viz. their 'scientific artworks'. Ruiz-Gómez's visual analysis of Pierre-André Brouillet's painting, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887), is a thread that runs throughout the introduction and four main chapters of the book. It is deployed to discuss Charcot's relationship with students and colleagues and his theatrical lecture style; to assess and identify the telltale pose of hysteria; to introduce other key people at Salpêtrière and to underscore Charcot's insistence to look, observe and record what one sees. The first chapter introduces Charcot and his work at Salpêtrière, highlighting visual connections between art and scientific observation; his study, known as the Musée Charcot, and its décor, function and arrangement; and the albums of visual material that are the core of the book's archival resources. In the second chapter, Ruiz-Gómez demonstrates how the photographic materials created at Salpêtrière, used to illustrate pathology in instruction, correspondence and publications, were often retouched with paint and gouache. She considers thoroughly the ramifications of retouching not only against common criticisms of Charcot as having invented 'hysteria' and its iconography, but also in relation to how such artistic choices alternately supported and subverted notions of objectivity based on close observation. Like digital images manipulated with editing software and filters, the photographs of hysterics and other patients at Salpêtrière may have been retouched in an effort to increase clarity-reducing blur, increasing contrast and/ or creating areas of visual prominence-justified as 'corrective' measures to make the
