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Thus his first impression and the resolution it led him to were decisive for the whole of his further development. His having a great number of chronic nervous patients at his disposal enabled him to make use of his own special gifts. He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature of an artist - he was, as he himself said, a ‘visuel’, a man who sees. Here is what he himself told us about his method of working. He used to look again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him. In his mind’s eye the apparent chaos presented by the continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave way to order: the new nosological pictures emerged, characterized by the constant combination of certain groups of symptoms. The complete and extreme cases, the ‘types’, could be brought into prominence with the help of a certain sort of schematic planning, and, with these types as a point of departure, the eye could travel over the long series of ill-defined cases - the ‘formes frustes’ - which, branching off from one or other characteristic feature of the type, melt away into indistinctness. He called this kind of intellectual work, in which he had no equal, ‘practising nosography’, and he took pride in it. He might be heard to say that the greatest satisfaction a man could have was to see something new - that is, to recognize it as new; and he remarked again and again on the difficulty and value of this kind of ‘seeing’. He would ask why it was that in medicine people only see what they have already learned to see. He would say that it was wonderful how one was suddenly able to see new things - new states of illness - which must probably be as old as the human race; and that he had to confess to himself that he now saw a number of things which he had overlooked for thirty years in his hospital wards. No physician needs to be told what a wealth of forms were acquired by neuropathology through him, and what increased precision and sureness of diagnosis were made possible by his observations. But the pupil who spent many hours with him going round the wards of the Salpêtrière - that museum of clinical facts, the names and peculiar characteristics of which were for the most part derived from him would be reminded of Cuvier, whose statue, standing in front of the Jardin des Plantes, shows that great comprehender and describer of the animal world surrounded by a multitude of animal forms; or else he would recall the myth of Adam, who, when God brought the creatures of Paradise before him to be distinguished and named, may have experienced to the fullest degree that intellectual enjoyment which Charcot praised so highly.

Charcot, indeed, never tired of defending the rights of purely clinical work, which consists in seeing and ordering things, against the encroachments of theoretical medicine. On one occasion there was a small group of us, all students from abroad, who, brought up on German academic physiology, were trying his patience with our doubts about his clinical innovations. ‘But that can’t be true,’ one of us objected, ‘it contradicts the Young-Helmholtz theory.’ He did not reply ‘So much the worse for the theory, clinical facts come first’ or words to that effect; but he did say something which made a great impression on us: ‘La theorie, c’est bon, mais ca n’empeche pas d’exister’.