https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/03/how-the-brain-lost-its-mind-allan-ropper-bd-burrell-review

In this study of psychiatry and neurology, Allan Ropper and BD Burrell ask: does mental illness reside in the brain or the mind?

The history of medicine abounds with oddball characters and bizarre events. Yet few figures are quite as eccentric as the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and few episodes reach the levels of absurdity displayed in his demonstrations of “hysterical” women being hypnotised in Paris in the late 19th century.

Charcot had begun so promisingly. Early in his career he made groundbreaking discoveries in multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, thereby earning himself the epithet “father of neurology”. But he became fixated on “hysteria”, a catch-all diagnosis that Victorian doctors applied to unconventional behaviour that defied medical explanation.