Jean Charcot was a French scientist born in 1825 in Paris and later died in 1893.His father was a carriage builder and could not afford tuition fee for his four sons. His father decided to educate the most intelligent of the four boys and fortunately Charcot made the top list. Charcot was a very talented artist and used his proficiency to draw and relate patterns in diseases and anatomy. Jean enrolled in a medical school due to his impressive performance. Charcot was thirsty for knowledge and had command of various languages including: French, English, German and Italian. This ability worked to his advantage as he could access various medical literature from various fields in different languages. These medical fields included: physiology, pathology, anatomy, gerontology, lungs and joint diseases (Goldstein, 1987, p.39).
Charcot graduated from medical school at the age of 23 where he interned at the ‘Hospital de la Salpetriere.’ Salpetriere was a big hospital which catered for patients with incurable chronic diseases especially those involving the nervous system. At this time, he wrote a thesis which clearly differentiated gout from chronic rheumatoid arthritis. The thesis pushed him to ‘chef de Clinique’in 1853. After serving for three years, he was later appointed as a physician in the hospital of Paris. In 1860, he was appointed as the pathological anatomy professor at the University of Paris (Goetz, Bonduelle, and, Gelfand ,1995, p.124). The professor was said to have a good teaching strategy which involved providing specimens and cadavers that aided in delivering a more practical and understandable lesson for the intellectual betterment of his students. Being that the lecturer was trained as a pathologist, he had a better understanding of the relationship between clinical and anatomical research and findings. Many of the famous anchored scientist were his students like: Sigmund Freud, Babinski Charles, and Gilles de la Tourette (Goldstein,1987, p.35). Charcot could interview one or more patients with the same condition in a case presentation, imitate neurological symptoms of the patients and draw illustrating pictures of the main clinical findings of the diseases. His drawing talent enabled him to give his students and audiences a more observable and visual image and interpretation of the disease.
Jean Charcot is considered the father of neurology where his studies and findings are useful in today’s medical fields and advancements. In this hospital, that he built a pathology lab, introduced ophthalmoscopy, photography, and microscopy. In 1862, Charcot received an appointment in the hospital as a senior physician. The hospital served as an asylum of the mentally ill patients. The number of his patients was very high where in 1862, he had about 5000 patients and among them, 3000 suffered from neurological diseases (Goldstein ,1987, p .52). His access to many subjects, made his studies more reliable and this feature attracted many students from all parts of the world. The center became a psychiatric training institution and offered psychiatric care to its patients. As a good scientist, Charcot, classified patients into groups depending on their specific neurological disorder. Later, Charcot was given an international recognition for his work in neurology which resulted to his appointment as the chair of neurological disease.
Charcot had three major contributions in psychology. The first contribution is the study of etiology and hysterical disorders cure. Charcot saw neuroses and hysteria as nervous system diseases which organic lesions were unknown (Hunter, 1998, p.33). During the scientist era, hysteria was thought to be woman disorder. His explanations and interpretations led to the correction of the thought truth. The nervous diseases were governed by same physiological laws (Charcot 2018). Jean Charcot states that traumatic ideas affect the patient although they are dissociated from the consciousness of the patient. He also states that heredity may render one to higher exposure to hysteria. According to Freud, hysteria is highly associated with sexual deprivations. The disorders that appeared to be physiological problems, lacked physiological explanations such as blindness, deafness, paralyses, anesthesia’s, and amnesias. However, evidence proved the root cause of the disorders in psychoneuroses is psychological alterations. The second factor of interest was the relationship between the psychological abnormalities of the nervous system and the specific behavioral symptoms. Charcot was famous for diagnosing the physiological disturbances of nervous system functioning. Lastly, Charcot used hypnosis as part of diagnosis and therapy (Hunter, 1998, p. 62). Hypnosis was used to investigate hysteria. Charcot believed only hysterical persons could be hypnotized and a clear manifestation of hysteria was as a result of hypnosis. Charcot established and distinguished three stages of hypnosis: lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism. Jean used hypnotism in distinguishing fake and true psychoneurotic. Hypnosis was useful in relieving hysterical symptoms. Although the subject received a lot of criticism, Charcot concluded that hypnosis can restore forgotten memory.
In conclusion, Jean Charcot is a scientist whose work is well profound and is still significant in today’s psychological and medical field at lager. He is also said to have pioneered the process of linking the mental and physiological processes. He introduces neurology as a specific scientific discipline. His explanations of hysteria and hypnosis is quite profound and useful. Charcot is a scientific father of various outstanding scientists, although his ideas have been proven to have flaws. It is evidently clear and precise to say that psychology could not be the same without the contributions of Jean Charcot.
REFERENCES
Charcot, Jean Martin. (2008). In International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/medicine/medicine-biographies/jean-martin-charcot#3045000183
Goetz. C, Michel Bonduelle, and Toby Gelfand. (1995). Charcot: Construction Neurology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, J. (1987). Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hunter, D. (1998). The Making of Dr. Charcot’s Hysteria Shows. Lampeter, The Edwin Press, Ltd.
