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CHARCOT

On the 16th of August of this year, J.M. Charcot died suddenly, without pain or illness, after a life of happiness and fame. In him, all too soon, the young science of neurology has lost its greatest leader, neurologists of every country have lost their master teacher and France has lost one of her foremost men. He was only sixty-eight years old; his physical strength and mental vigour, together with the hopes he so frankly expressed, seemed to promise him the long life which has been granted to not a few mental workers of this century. The nine imposing volumes of his Oevres complètes, in which his pupils had collected his contributions to medicine and neuropathology, his Leçons du mardi, the yearly reports of his clinic at the Salpêtrière, and other works besides - all these publications will remain precious to science and to his pupils; but they cannot take the place of the man, who had still much more to give and to teach and whose person or whose writings no one has yet approached without learning something from them.

He took an honest, human delight in his own great success and used to enjoy talking of his beginnings and the road he had travelled. His scientific curiosity, he said, had been aroused early, when he was still a young interne, by the mass of material presented by the facts of neuropathology, material which was not in the least understood at the time. In those days, whenever he went the rounds with his senior in one of the departments of the Salpêtrière (the institution for the care of women) amid all the wilderness of paralyses, spasms and convulsions for which forty years ago there was neither name nor understanding, he would say: ‘Faudrait y retourner et y rester’, and he kept his word. When he became médecin des hôspitaux, he at once took steps to enter the Salpêtrière in one of the departments for nervous patients. Having got there, he stayed where he was instead of doing what French senior physicians are entitled to do - transferring in regular succession from one department to another and from hospital to hospital, and at the same time changing their speciality as well.