1908

Fifteen years after Charcot’s death, Paris Neurological Society, led by Babinski, dismantled Charcot’s notion of hysteria, arguing that hysterical symptoms “were in fact the results of organic disease, iatrogenesis, or simulation. . . . the full membership of the organization, with one exception, agreed officially to discard hysteria in reference to each of the symptom categories and to restrict its application to the new concept of ‘the hysterical syndromes’” (Micale II, 519). “Almost immediately upon the death of Charcot, the nineteenth-century pan-diagnosis of hysteria began to break apart under its own weight, and the many clinical states that it had contained began to scatter” (525).