The Model Patient: Observation and Illustration at the Musée Charcot

This chapter focuses on largely unknown and unpublished albums from the Musee Charcot’s collection that replicate the museum’s methodology in miniature. Most of the drawings in the Musee Charcot albums are unsigned, and a wide variety of styles and hands is evident. The scientific riches offered by the live patient complemented the museum’s human remains, wax casts, and artistic renderings. Charcot’s focused attention while staring at the patient’s body was similar to the close looking required by the artist sketching a model or by the connoisseur studying a work of art. The albums in the Musee Charcot showcase the evident pleasure in the collecting, categorizing, observing, rendering, and illustrating of illness, which was only made possible by the patients who modeled, willingly or not, at the Salpetriere. The patient models not only for a savant-artiste, but also for the medical community at the Salpetriere who would study Mme Beau’s image for signs of pathology in one of the museum’s albums.