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Unforgettable voices
‘City of Incurable Women’
fuses fact and fiction
By Kathleen Rooney
Star Tribune
I
ncurable can be a fun hyperbolic
adjective when used whimsically — for
instance, an incurable romantic — but it
becomes a chilling description when ap-
plied to actual medical conditions, fatalistic
and revelatory of gaps in knowledge and
the biases that exist within this supposedly
objective fi eld.
In her seventh book, “City of Incurable
Women,” Maud Casey explores these
blind spots as they historically aff ected
women suff ering from mental illnesses
and psychosomatic disorders that baffl ed
their male doctors, men whose curiosity
“often swerved into cruelty.”
Casey’s most recent novel, “The Man
Who Walked Away,” was based on the
real-life case history of Albert Dadas, a
19th-century psychiatric patient in the
hospital of St. André in Bordeaux, prone
to wandering in a trance-like state.
Here — through extensive research,
archival documents and black-and-white
photographs — Casey crafts a collection
of linked narrative pieces inspired in part
by Georges Didi-Huberman’s book “The
Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Pho-
tographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière,”
about Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist
who coined the diagnosis of hysteria at
the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris where he
worked between the 1860s and the 1890s.
Originally a gunpowder factory (hence
the name) the Salpêtrière was converted
to a hospice for poor women in 1656 and
the vastness of the sprawling compound
is what prompted Didi-Huberman to
refer to it as a “city of incurable women,”
a concept Casey uses to contemplate
the connections between physical and
psychic spaces.
She quotes Charcot himself in his “Lec-
tures on Diseases of the Nervous Sys-
tem” as noting that the massive asylum
contained a population of over 5,000, “in-
cluding a great number called incurables
who are admitted for life,” meaning that:
“In other words, we are in possession of
a kind of living pathological museum, the
resources of which were considerable.”
Mixing truth and imagination, Casey
reveals both the grim facts of the place
— “one doctor for every fi ve hundred
patients. Three diff erent kinds of diets:
two meals, one meal, and starvation” —
and the complexity of the women these
doctors reduce to objects of study and
repulsed fascination.
Casey conjures a collective voice for
these so-called hysterics, writing of their
Bellevue Literary Press
lives “in the before” in a way that returns
their subjectivity to them: “When we turned
ten, it was time to learn the catechism, time
for our First Communion. Some of us left
school because of an infestation that de-
stroyed the crops. Some of us took work
behind the doors of the silk factory.”
Elsewhere, she uses the fi rst person to
deliver monologues in the personae of in-
dividual patients, including Jane Avril, the
famed can-can dancer from the Moulin
Rouge, who spent time in the Salpêtrière
as a teenager.
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i
d
0% d b ing
Casey’s dedication reads “for my fel-
low incurables” and this short, enchant-
ingly strange book feels animated by
compassion. In the section on Geneviève
Legrand, she writes, “Bodies, you think,
are like haunted houses.” These accounts
haunt the reader with their subjects’
strength of spirit, even amid their thwart-
ed dreams and desires.
–––
Kathleen Rooney is the author of “Lillian
Boxfi sh Takes a Walk” and, most recently,
“Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.”
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