A unique account of a peasant girl's mental illness in nineteenth-century FranceHysteria Complicated by Ecstasy offers a rare window into the inner life of a person ordinarily inaccessible to historians: a semiliterate peasant girl who lived almost two centuries ago, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Eighteen-year-old Nanette Leroux fell ill in 1822 with a variety of incapacitating nervous symptoms. Living near the spa at Aix-les-Bains, she became the charity patient of its medical director, Antoine Despine, who treated her with hydrotherapy and animal magnetism, as hypnosis was then called. Jan Goldstein translates, and provides a substantial introduction to, the previously unpublished manuscript recounting Nanette's strange illness-a manuscript coauthored by Despine and Alexandre Bertrand, the Paris physician who memorably diagnosed Nanette as suffering from "hysteria complicated by ecstasy." While hysteria would become a fashionable disease among urban women by the end of the nineteenth century, the case of Nanette Leroux differs sharply from this pattern in its early date and rural setting.Filled with intimate details about Nanette's behavior and extensive quotations of her utterances, the case is noteworthy for the sexual references that contemporaries did not recognize as such; for its focus on the difference between biological and social time; and for Nanette's fascination with the commodities available in the region's nascent marketplace. Goldstein's introduction brilliantly situates the text in its multiple contexts, examines it from the standpoint of early nineteenth-century medicine, and uses the insights of Foucault and Freud to craft a twenty-first-century interpretation.A compelling, multilayered account of one young woman's mental afflictions, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy is an extraordinary addition to the cultural and social history of psychiatry and medicine.

List of Illustrations viiPreface ixPart One: HYSTERIA COMPLICATED BY ECSTASYSexuality, Time, and Commodities in the Malady of Nanette Leroux
Chapter 1: PRELIMINARIES 3The Authors of the Case: An Inbuilt Polyphony 6The Plot Summary 11Chapter 2: CONTEXTS 18Contexts: What They Do for the Reader, andHow Many Are Enough 18Savoy: Old Regime, Revolution, and PiedmonteseRestoration 20The Spa: A Characteristically Nineteenth-Century Setting 35Commodities and Consumer Culture 42Diagnostics: Catalepsy and Hysteria circa 1820 46Medicine and Science as Public Spectacle 56The Local Scientifi c Public Sphere 64Scientifi c Networks, or How Despine Found Bertrand 65Religion in Savoy and in the Leroux Case 69Defi ant Women: Despine's Chagrins Domestiques 73
Chapter 3: MAKING SENSE OF THE CASE 83The Authors' Understanding of the Case 83A Twenty-First-Century Interpretation of the Case 94Chapter 4: TEXTUAL MATTERS 128Nanette Leroux or "Nanette Leroux": The Issue of Pseudonyms 128Palimpsest and Polyphony: The State of the Manuscript 129Choosing a Text for Translation 133
Part Two: THE TEXT OF THE CASE HISTORY OBSERVATIONS OF NANETTE LEROUXHysteria Complicated by Ecstasy 137Appendix On the Compatibility of Foucauldian and Freudian Approaches 201Notes 205Index 239