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City of Incurable Women

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored

"City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty." —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through

"Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?" wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history's ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris's Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including The Man Who Walked Away, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

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    • Kirkus

      December 15, 2021
      An innovative novel examining the experiences of the female "hysterics" at the infamous Salp�tri�re Hospital in 19th-century Paris. The photographs of the women of Salp�tri�re range from pity-inducing to horrific. In black and white, the portraits show women in "passionate attitudes," the phrase used for the phases of hysteria. The women in the photos suffer from a multitude of issues: anorexia, religious fervor, epilepsy, and other conditions, some of which were little more than moodiness. In Casey's unusual collection of short pieces that blur lines among fiction, poetry, and essay, these photos and other historical records, such as manuals and case notes, are used as the basis of poetic meditations on the collective and individual lives of these "incurables." Some of the women have names: "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" tells the story of Augustine, who escaped from the asylum by dressing as a man. "Father, Ether, Sea" illuminates the life of Blanche, who falls into the category of "best girls," women who were exploited into performances in the asylum amphitheater to show off their ailments and the doctors' "cures," which often cross the line into abuses of all kinds. Some of the chapters are about the women as an anonymous group, such as "In the Before," told in the first-person plural about the types of lives the women had before they came to Salp�tri�re: They were orphans or children of manual laborers, impoverished, hyperactive, or melancholy. These stories belong most closely to the tradition of ekphrastic poetry, poems written based on visual art and often written in the voice of a figure from the image. The results are most successful when the soaringly lyrical language illuminates, rather than overshadows, the women's compelling experiences. A strongly conceived, though inconsistently rendered, scrapbook from a dark chapter of the belle epoque.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 20, 2021
      Casey’s enlightening latest (after The Man Who Walked Away) imagines the lives of female “hysterics” confined at the Salpêtrière, a 19th-century psychiatric hospital in Paris. The work, unshackled from traditional elements such as plot, characters, or earned endings, alternately reads like a prose poem, a fever dream, and a compendium of primary sources. Casey wanders among the thoughts and histories of a chambermaid, a foundling, and a seamstress, juxtaposing their motives, thoughts, and dreams with accounts of their rapes by previous employers and sexual exploitation by their doctors who “disguise it as science,” as well as the dehumanizing doctors’ case notes, which mention tattooing the patients with the name of the hospital. The first-person plural narration, meanwhile, blurs the women’s identities (“None of us wanted to fall, but then we were falling”). Illuminating illustrations and references to the real people who inspired the story add texture to a distressing account of a dark history, and Casey’s rich imaginative leaps make for tantalizing and affecting portraits. It defies convention and revels in searing, gorgeous language. In fact, this is worth reading twice. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary.

    • Booklist

      February 1, 2022
      Following a stint in nonfiction with The Art of Mystery (2018), novelist Casey turns her lyrical prose back to fiction with this work inspired by the real stories of women in Paris' Salp�tri�re hospital. Casey chronicles the work of early neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who used photography and hypnosis as tools to study mental illness. Though celebrated in the field, Charcot often treated his patients as subhuman, using them as pawns to gain knowledge. Through thorough research and a cutting pen, Casey elevates these women back to their deserved place in history, bringing to life those who were reduced to mere photographs. Newcomers to Casey's work might be daunted by these vignettes, which sometimes seem more stream of consciousness than cohesive narrative. The book isn't for the fainthearted, but those interested in early medicine will find the stories of Charcot's patients fascinating, and fans of Casey's previous works will rejoice in the new one.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Hope Newhouse's sensitive performance of Maud Casey's phantasmagorical novel lingers long in the listener's imagination. Blending fact with fiction, the author explores the nineteenth-century phenomenon of women hospitalized with hysteria. Diagnosed by male doctors, the women had symptoms that included everything from anxiety, fainting, and irritability to insomnia, sexual desire, and loss of desire. With fictional portraits and actual case notes from Paris's Salp�tri�re Hospital, Newhouse has created a haunting study of mysterious occurrences, individual agency, and power dynamics. Newhouse's light, precise voice and welcoming tone immediately engage listeners in the women's personal accounts, both straightforward and kaleidoscopic. Her impeccable French further increases the verisimilitude as listeners wander among these remarkably resilient women, their ghosts, and their stigmata. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      June 1, 2022

      Once an armory, the Piti�-Salp�tri�re Hospital became a hospice for poor women in 1656. Over the years, it housed the indigent, the mentally ill, the erotic, the epileptic, and the inconvenient women of Paris. Casey (The Man Who Walked Away) draws from the hospital's history and provides listeners with vignettes of women who were kept there to be studied by the famous Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. Narrator Hope Newhouse breathes life into these women with her immaculate French accent and expert use of pacing. Newhouse speeds up and slows down much in the way the characters would have told their own stories, artfully using sotto voce to add authenticity. Listeners will miss the pictures and documents that are a part of the printed book, but those looking at the images will miss hearing the voices of these unfortunate women telling their own stories. VERDICT Reimagining and giving voice to women used as study subjects, Casey, with great assistance here by Newhouse, has created a unique work to share with literary and historical fiction readers.--Laura Trombley

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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