[J.M. Charcot 1825-1893. A life of labor].

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) is regarded as the father of clinical neurology. He was born in Paris. At the age of nineteen he began his medical studies at the University of Paris and after having passed his internship he continued his education in the Paris hospital system and successively passed from chief of clinic to physician to the hospitals of Paris and to professor at the Faculty of Medicine. Early in his academic medical career he was concerned chiefly with problems of internal medicine and produced lasting tributes to clinical and pathological understanding of especially rheumatism. His interests eventually settled to the study of disorders of the nervous system. In 1862 he was appointed physician to the Hospital of the Salpêtrière, which was to become the center of his discoveries and fame. The Salpêtrière, which had a long history as asylum and prison, was when Charcot arrived still a custodial institution for unclassified and displaced unfortunates, numbering about five thousand. Out of this hodge-podge Charcot developed in a few years the world's greatest center for clinical neurological research and introduced his famous clinico-pathological approach to the study of neurological disorders, by which he was able to classify, for the first time, a number of unknown diseases of the nervous system, the spinal cord as well as the cerebrum. Even to day his clinical descriptions of some of these disorders are unsurpassed, and they are still registrated with his name as an eponym. In 1882 a Chair of Clinical Diseases of the Nervous System, the first in medical history, was created for Charcot in the Salpêtrière. His fame as a scientist, practioner and especially as a teacher attracted students and patients from all parts of the world. He was an artist as well as a scientist, and he was the first to use projection material in medical teaching, using his own drawings as illustrations. ...