Charcot, the Salpêtrière, and hypnosis in late-nineteenth-century medicine
Jean-Martin Charcot used hypnosis in the study of hysteria at the Salpêtrière. The Nancy school disputed his account. The episode shaped medicine, and later scepticism.
Last reviewed 27 August 2026
Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) made the Paris hospital Salpêtrière a world centre for neurology. Hypnosis entered that theatre as a way to produce and classify hysterical phenomena, not as everyday clinical hypnotherapy.
Key evidence
Charcot treated hypnotisability as tightly linked to hysteria and described staged phases of the hypnotic state. Students and visitors (including a young Freud) watched public lessons. The Nancy school (Liébeault, Bernheim) argued that suggestion, not a special neuropathology, explained the same phenomena: a dispute that still echoes in “state versus social-cognitive” debates (Hilgard later restated the laboratory side).
Braid had already tried to naturalise the method (Neurypnology). Charcot re-medicalised it inside a famous hospital brand.
Limitations
Demonstration patients were not a random sample. Photograph and lecture culture rewarded dramatic fits. That is a bias, not a footnote.
What we don't know yet
How much of “grande hystérie” was iatrogenic performance remains a live historical question. It does not settle whether later RCTs of hypnotherapy are valid.
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