[Charcot: a scientific Janus].

An eminent scientist, recognized as one of the world's most prominent professors of neurology, Charcot was, in his time, both highly respected and chastised as a third-rate show-off. Charcot's scientific career was a continuous mixture of rigorous clinical neurology (including detailed descriptions of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, brain anatomy, etc.) and uncontrolled, controversial and sometimes even theatrical experiments in the field of hysteria. Charcot's fame was as much the result of the unquestionable quality of his scientific work as that of his theatrical presentations. These two inseparable and simultaneous aspects of his scientific career were the two roads that led Charcot and the Salpêtrière Hospital to the height of success in the second half of the nineteenth century.