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In Vienna we have repeatedly had occasion to realize that the intellectual significance of an academic teacher is not necessarily combined with a direct personal influence on younger men which leads to the creation of a large and important school. If Charcot was so much more fortunate in this respect we must put it down to the personal qualities of the man - to the magic that emanated from his looks and from his voice, to the kindly openness which characterized his manner as soon as his relations with someone had overcome the stage of initial strangeness, to the willingness with which he put everything at the disposal of his pupils, and to his life-long loyalty to them. The hours he spent in his wards were hours of companionship and of an exchange of ideas with the whole of his medical staff. He never shut himself away from them there. The youngest newly-qualified physician walking the wards had a chance of seeing him at his work and might interrupt him at it; and the same freedom was enjoyed by students from abroad, who, in later years, were never lacking at his rounds. And, lastly, on the evenings when Madame Charcot was at home to a distinguished company, assisted by a highly-gifted daughter who was growing up in the likeness of her father, the pupils and medical assistants who were always present met the guests as part of the family.

In 1882 or 1883, the circumstances of Charcot’s life and work took on their final form. People had come to realize that the activities of this man were a part of the assets of the nation’s ‘gloire’, which, after the unfortunate war of 1870-1, was all the more jealously guarded. The government, at the head of which was Charcot’s old friend, Gambetta, created a Chair of Neuropathology for him in the Faculty of Medicine (so that he could give up the Chair of Pathological Anatomy) and also a clinic, with auxiliary scientific departments, at the Salpêtrière. ‘Le service de M. Charcot’ now included, in addition to the old wards for chronic female patients, several clinical rooms where male patients, too, were received, a huge out-patient department - the ‘consultation externe’ -, a histological laboratory, a museum, an electro-therapeutic department, an eye and ear department and a special photographic studio. All these things were so many means of keeping former assistants and pupils permanently at the clinic in secure posts. The two-storeyed, weathered-looking buildings and the courtyards which they enclosed reminded the stranger vividly of our Allgemeines Krankenhaus; but no doubt the resemblance did not go far enough. ‘It may not be beautiful here, perhaps,’ Charcot would say when he showed a visitor his domain, ‘but there is room for everything you want to do.’