Jean-Martin Charcot - Legacy

Legacy

One of Charcot's greatest legacies as a clinician is his contribution to the development of systematic neurological examination, correlating a set of clinical signs with specific lesions. This was made possible by his pioneering long-term studies of patients, coupled with microscopic and anatomic analysis derived from eventual autopsies. This led to the first clear delination of various neurological diseases and classic description of them. For example, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Charcot is just as famous for his students: Sigmund Freud, Joseph Babinski, Pierre Janet, William James, Pierre Marie, Albert Londe, Charles-Joseph Bouchard, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Alfred Binet, and Albert Pitres. Charcot bestowed the eponym for Tourette syndrome in honor of his student, Georges Gilles de la Tourette.

Although by the 1870s, Charcot was France's best known physician, according to Edward Shorter, his ideas in psychiatry were refuted, and France did not recover for decades. Shorter wrote in his A History of Psychiatry that Charcot himself understood "almost nothing" about major psychiatric illness, and that he was "quite lacking in common sense and grandiosely sure of his own judgement". However, this perspective overlooks that Charcot never claimed to be practicing psychiatry or to be a psychiatrist, a field that was separately organized from neurology within France's educational and public health systems. After his death, the illness "hysteria" that Charcot described was claimed to be nothing more than an "artifact of suggestion".

However, the negative judgment of Charcot's work on hysteria is influenced by a significant shift in diagnostic criteria and conception of hysteria which occurred in the decades following his death. The historical perspective on Charcot's work on hysteria has also been distorted by viewing him as a precursor of Freud (whose markedly different conception of hysteria was extensively addressed by feminist historians in the last decades of the 20th century).

In fact, Charcot argued vehemently against the widespread medical and popular prejudice that hysteria was rarely found in men. He taught that due to this prejudice these "cases often went unrecognised, even by distinguished doctors" and could occur in such models of masculinity as railway engineers or soldiers. Charcot's analysis, in particular his view of hysteria as an organic condition which could be caused by trauma, paved the way for understanding neurological symptoms arising from industrial-accident or war-related traumas.

Charcot appears, along with Maria Skłodowska-Curie (Madame Curie) and Charcot's patient "Blanche" (Marie Wittman), in Per Olov Enquist's 2004 novel The Book about Blanche and Marie (English translation, 2006, ISBN 1-58567-668-3). He also appears in the 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces, and in Axel Munthe's 1929 autobiographical novel The Story of San Michele. In a letter to the New York Times Book Review of January 18, 1931, however, Charcot's son wrote that "Dr Munthe never was trained by my father." And in his 2008 biography of Munthe (ISBN 978-1-84511-720-7), Bengt Jangfeldt says that 'Charcot is not mentioned in a single letter of Axel's out of the hundreds that have been preserved from his Paris years.' Distorted views of Charcot as harsh and tyrannical have arisen from some sources that mistakenly identify Munthe as Charcot's assistant and take Munthe's autobiographical novel as a factual memoir. In fact, Munthe was just a medical student among hundreds of others. Munthe's most direct contact with Charcot was when he helped a young female patient "escape" from a ward of the hospital and took her into his home. Charcot threatened to advise the police and ordered that Munthe not be allowed on the wards of the hospital again.

Charcot Island in Antarctica was discovered by his son, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who named the Island in honor of his father.