City of Incurable Women

“City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily & 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, & haunting lyrical beauty.” — Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend & What Are You Going ThroughIn a fusion of fact & fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored.°°°“Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized & dispossessed due to their gender & 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 & medical documents both authentic & invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital & reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot & his male colleagues. °°°Maud Casey is the author of four novels, The Shape of Things to Come, Genealogy, The Man Who Walked Away, City of Incurable Women; a collection of stories, Drastic; & a book of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. She is an Associate Professor of English & teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson & was a faculty member at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in 2009. She has received the Italo Calvino Prize (2008), the St. Francis College Literary Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2008-2009 DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities Fellowship, & international fellowships from the Fundacion Valparaiso & the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers... 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 ""Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?" wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history's ghosts, they have been revived at last by Maud Casey in City of Incurable Women as complex, flesh-and-blood people, dispossessed and marginalized due to their gender and class but with their own stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and re-imagined, poignantly restore the humanity to the 19th 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 students"-- Provided by publisher In A Marvelous Fusion Of Fact And Fiction, Nineteenth-century Women Institutionalized As Hysterics Reveal What History Ignored