280

Charcot was in the very prime of life when this abundance of facilities for teaching and research were placed at his disposal. He was a tireless worker, and always, I believe, the busiest in the whole institute. His private consultations, to which patients flocked ‘from Samarkand and the Antilles’, could not keep him from his teaching activities or his researches. There is no doubt that this throng of people did not turn to him solely because he was a famous discoverer but quite as much because he was a great physician and friend of man, who could always find an answer to a problem and who, when the present state of science did not allow him to know, was able to make a good guess. He has often been blamed for his therapeutic method which, with its multiplicity of prescriptions, could not but offend a rationalistic conscience. But he was simply continuing the procedures which were customary at that time and place, without deceiving himself much about their efficacy. He was, however, not pessimistic in his therapeutic expectations, and repeatedly showed readiness to try new methods of treatment in his clinic: their short-lived success was to find its explanation elsewhere.

As a teacher, Charcot was positively fascinating. Each of his lectures was a little work of art in construction and composition; it was perfect in form and made such an impression that for the rest of the day one could not get the sound of what he had said out of one’s ears or the thought of what he had demonstrated out of one’s mind. He seldom demonstrated a single patient, but

mostly a series of similar or contrasting cases which he compared with one another. In the hall in which he gave his lectures there hung a picture which showed ‘citizen’ Pinel having the chains taken off the poor madmen in the Salpêtri re. The Salpêtrière, which had witnessed so many horrors during the Revolution, had also been the scene of this most humane of all revolutions. At such lectures Maître Charcot himself made a curious impression. He, who at other times bubbled over with vivacity and cheerfulness and who always had a joke on his lips, now looked serious and solemn under his little velvet cap; indeed, he even seemed to have grown older. His voice sounded subdued. We could almost understand how ill-disposed strangers could reproach the whole lecture with being theatrical. Those who spoke like this were doubtless accustomed to the formlessness of German clinical lectures, or else forgot that Charcot gave only one lecture in the week and could therefore prepare it carefully.

In this formal lecture, in which everything was prepared and everything had to have its place, Charcot was no doubt following a deeply-rooted tradition; but he also felt the need to give his audience a less elaborated picture of his activities. This purpose was served by his out-patient clinic of which he took personal charge in what were known as his ‘Leçons du mardi’. There he took up cases which were completely unknown to him; he exposed himself to all the chances of an examination, all the errors of a first investigation; he would put aside his authority on occasion and admit - in one case that he could arrive at no diagnosis and in another that he had been deceived by appearances; and he never appeared greater to his audience than when, by giving the most detailed account of his processes of thought and by showing the greatest frankness about his doubts and hesitations, he had thus sought to narrow the gulf between teacher and pupil. The publication of these improvised lectures, given in the year 1887 and 1888, at first in French and now in German as well, has also immeasurably widened the circle of his admirers; and never before has a work on neuropathology had such a success with the medical public as this.