Departures of note

Marie Wittman, known as Blanche, was a patient at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris who became a central figure in Jean-Martin Charcot's controversial demonstrations of hysteria. After Charcot's death in 1893, she reportedly never had another attack, but she later claimed in a 1906 interview that her symptoms had been real and that it was not possible to fool Charcot with acting. She returned to the hospital in 1889 as an assistant to photographer Albert Londe, and both her arms were eventually amputated due to radiation-induced cancer from her work in the radiology department. She died in 1913 at age 54.

Wittman was born in Paris on April 15, 1859. Her father, a Swiss carpenter, went insane and was institutionalized; her mother was a linen maid. Five of her eight siblings died of epilepsy and seizures. At 22 months old, Wittman became deaf and mute after seizures, but regained speech and hearing around age seven. She had difficulty learning and could barely read or write. At age 12, she was apprenticed to a furrier who attempted to rape her and later beat her; she ran away. After her mother died when she was 15, she returned to the furrier, had sex with him regularly for eight months, then fled. She worked as a servant at the Salpêtrière and was admitted as a patient in an epilepsy ward on May 6, 1877, at age 18.

Upon admission, Wittman had partial numbness on her right side, loss of sensitivity in her left arm, and ovarian sensitivity before attacks. Her attacks, which began seven days after admission, lasted up to several hours and followed three stages Charcot identified: epileptoid, generalized clonic period, and delirium. During them she made rapid motions, became rigid, acted out sexual scenes, and mumbled, frequently uttering the name of her sister Blanche, which became her nickname. Charcot treated her with hypnosis, ether, chloroform, amyl nitrite, static electricity, and faradisation. She was a subject in his weekly lectures and demonstrations, which were attended by performers including Sarah Bernhardt, but were criticized as circus-like and sexually suggestive. Some claimed patients feigned symptoms for attention, a charge made by intern Alfred Binet in 1890 and later by Charcot's assistant Joseph Babinski after Charcot's death.

Wittman is depicted in André Brouillet's 1887 painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, which made her a model of hysteria at the time. The painting is usually interpreted as showing her undergoing a hysteric fit under hypnosis, though a 2020 paper argues the apparatus next to Charcot is a du Bois-Reymond induction device, suggesting she was in hypnotic lethargy with an electrically induced ecstatic expression. A 2017 study concluded she likely suffered from psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, though mass hysteria from conditions at the Salpêtrière was also possible. Per Olov Enquist's 2004 novel Boken om Blanche och Marie, which took the form of purported lost journals by Wittman, portrayed her in a sexual relationship with Charcot and as Marie Curie's assistant; a 2007 letter in The Lancet criticized the novel for slandering an unfortunate patient and two icons of science.