Céard J
GREHM, Université Paris XII-Créteil.
Hist Sci Med. 1994;28(4):337-43.
What an advantage, he, who is studying devil and witchcraft stories, would get with "Retrospective medicine" carried through the "Ecole de la Salpêtrière"? Those are collected in the Sister Jeanne des Anges autobiography plentiful annotations, printed by the "Bibliothèque Diabolique" from Bourneville (1886) and "Les démoniaques dans l'art", written by Charcot and Richer (1887). The first one is proposing to evoque the nun's symptoms as hysterical facts and to find every typical expression regarding that disease. It does not go thoroughly into the hallucinations content, that is to say the imaginative part of them, as well as contemporary people minding that hysteria remains unchanging year after year and that its cultural alterations are really uninteresting. Charcot and Richer's book asserts that the devilish is a devilish without fiend, that is why it is approving the Saint-Médard's convulsive people but, on the contrary, nothing is said about the bright witchcraft pictures. Then, despite its history, devilish contain is going hand to hand. Those historical studies are not trying to give a run down on a medical view of devilish approach but to make clear real hysterical knowledge; it means that before the medical deepening every one knows that dense disease.