Hustvedt's focus on the three women - Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève - gives a face to her story of a condition that the medical community no longer recognizes.
Her thorough research and elegant writing bring the women to life and prevent the story from getting bogged down in social and medical questions about hysteria itself.
All three women came from impoverished families and suffered abuse and neglect that seemed to provoke some of their early hysterical outbursts. They ended up at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital, a massive institution that housed women suffering from mental and physical ailments, as well as some women who were simply poor or elderly.
Doctors diagnosed hysteria in women who suffered from a variety of symptoms that resembled conditions ranging from depression and anxiety to schizophrenia or epilepsy. But doctors also linked seemingly normal behavior to the illness, as was the case with Augustine, then 14, who had a rebellious streak and liked to look pretty.
"Everything in her . . . announced the hysteric," one doctor wrote about Augustine. "The care that she takes in her toilette; the styling of her hair, the ribbons she likes to adorn herself with."
Charcot believed that hysteria was an illness linked to brain anatomy, and he looked in vain for lesions in the cadavers of women who had suffered from the illness. He used the three women to prove his hypothesis that hysterics would present certain poses under hypnosis - that despite the array of symptoms, a common thread linked them.
