Hysteria complicated by ecstasy
Subtitle: the case of Nanette Leroux
By: Jan Goldstein.
Contributors: Bertrand, Alexandre-Jacques-François, 1795-1831.; Despine, Charles-Humbert-Antoine, 1777-1852.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Princeton
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
ISBN-13: 9780691011868
Subjects: Leroux, Nanette -- Mental health; Hysteria -- Case studies; Psychiatry -- France -- History -- 19th century
Genres: Case studies.
Description: "Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy offers a rare window into the inner life of a person ordinarily inaccessible to historians: a semiliterate peasant girl who lived almost two centuries ago, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Eighteen-year-old Nanette Leroux fell ill in 1822 with a variety of incapacitating nervous symptoms. Living near the spa at Aix-les-Bains, she became the charity patient of its medical director, Antoine Despine, who treated her with hydrotherapy and animal magnetism, as hypnosis was then called. Jan Goldstein translates, and provides a substantial introduction to, the previously unpublished manuscript recounting Nanette's strange illness - a manuscript coauthored by Despine and Alexandre Bertrand, the Paris physician who diagnosed Nanette as suffering from "hysteria complicated by ecstasy.""--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.