Charcot Quotes & Sayings

The suggested idea or group of ideas," said M. Charcot, very justly, " find themselves in their isolation sheltered against the control of that great collection of personal ideas, a long time accumulated and organised, which constitute consciousness properly so called, the Ego." ' " With certain subjects it is possible to call forth, by means of suggestion or intimation, a coherent group of associated ideas which install themsehes in the mind in tlie fashion of a parasite, remain isolated from all the rest, and may be explained outwardly by corresponding motor phenomena." " We ask permission to preserve this striking metaphor: Suggestions, with their automatic and independent development, are real parasites in thought. — Anonymous

This study began in an exact and precise manner only with the labours of Professor Charcot at the Salpetriere, on the traumatic accidents of the hystericals: the paralyses, the contractures, mutisms, or anorexias. Everywhere, as we have seen, he showed the importance of the fixed idea which produced and kept up the accident, the reproduction of identical facts by suggestion, the treatment by isolation, and the moral influences which modified not the physical state, but the mental pathological state of the hysterical. It remained to generalise somewhat more this conception — Anonymous

Muscular dystrophy ... was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s. By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: 'How is it that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance - a disease which has doubtless always existed - how is it that it is recognised only now? Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?' — Oliver Sacks

If the clinician, as observer, wishes to see things as they really are, he must make a tabula rasa of his mind and proceed without any preconceived notions whatever. — Jean-Martin Charcot

Symptoms, then, are in reality nothing but a cry from suffering organs. — Jean-Martin Charcot

How is it, one fine morning, Duchenne discovered a disease which probably existed in the time of Hippocrates. — Jean-Martin Charcot

Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing. — Jean-Martin Charcot

Tourette's syndrome is seen in every race, every culture, every stratum of society; it can be recognized at a glance once one is attuned to it; and cases of barking and twitching, of grimacing, of strange gesturing, of involuntary cursing and blaspheming, were recorded by Aretaeus of Cappadocia almost two thousand years ago. Yet it was not clinically delineated until 1885, when Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a young French neurologist - a pupil of Charcot's and a friend of Freud's - put together these historical accounts with observations of some of his own patients. The syndrome as he described it was characterized, above all, by convulsive tics, — Oliver Sacks