Jean-Martin Charcot and his legacy.

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) rightly is considered the father of both modern neurology and psychiatry in France and much beyond. While he never was interested in mental disease and what was called 'alienism' at the time, his career at La Salpêtrière Hospital over 30 years was mainly marked by the development of a huge group of students which focused on the study and management of hysteria. When Charcot took office at the beginning of 1862, hysteria was a 'no-man's land', medically speaking, since neither the alienists nor the internists had much interest in this condition. At La Salpêtrière, these chronic patients were largely left to themselves before Désiré Bourneville, one of Charcot's first students, convinced his chief to care for them. Subsequently, the studies of Charcot with Paul Richer, Joseph Babinski, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Sollier, Pierre Janet, and many others allowed the condition to be addressed in detail. During his stay with Charcot in 1885-1866, Sigmund Freud, a young neuropathologist at the time, became fascinated by hysteria, an interest which probably was the main start of his interest in psychology. Charcot emphasized the concept of mental factors in hysteria, along with that of a 'dynamic' lesion, which accounted for the lack of neuropathological findings in the patients. While his ideas on hysteria and hypnotism were criticized after his death even by former pupils, such as Babinski, recent findings from functional studies using magnetic resonance imaging show how accurate and often visionary Charcot's thinking was in this field.