If hysteria in the second half of the nineteenth century was a condition with an already well-established cultural history (one that, since Plato’s descriptions of the wandering and dissatisfied empty womb, had functioned primarily as a fundamental fantasmatic pathology of the biological body and of woman’s sex) then Charcot’s leadership of the Salpêtrière hospital marks a turning point in the epistemological configuration of hysteria. He relocated it into the domain of modern neurology and scientific positivism, and established new guidelines for its clinical treatment and demonstration, which were also grounded in archival, visual, and performative practices. From the 1870s onward, a series of methodological, administrative, and infrastructural transformations emerged around the problem of the indeterminacy of hysteria’s origin and organic laws, transforming the Salpêtrière into the most advanced research site of its time, while simultaneously and implicitly expanding its function as a scientific institution into the domains of the archive, the museum, and the theatrical institution.

Through the study of interned patients, Charcot and his collaborators indirectly or directly formulated universal conclusions about any member of the female sex, her nature, and her (in)capacity for political agency. The phenomenon of female hysteria thus also served as an argument for the preventive exclusion of women from the public sphere. Yet, as Smrekar demonstrates, the entanglement of power and knowledge in this case is even more tightly bound and circularly argued. Mechanisms of power had already constructed the female sex in advance by pushing it into the domain of bodily simulation and posing, of decor and appearance. This enforced masquerade, positioned as the core of sexually determined identity, then functioned as justification for approaching the truth of the individual patient with deep suspicion—for assuming that her truth lay hidden beneath the surface, and that it had to be violently extracted, forced into disclosure.

— Kaja Kraner, from the afterword