Macrodactylism (enlargement of the fingers)
New iconography from 'Salpêtrière: Clinic for Disorders of the Nervous System', 1903
The Paris-based psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot was well known
in late 19th-century Europe through the dissemination of his
photographic journals on the study of mental illness, produced at
La Salpêtrière hospital from 1888 to 1918. Cropped, framed and
measured, the patients' bodies provided doctors with a visual
vocabulary of disease. But doctors were not the only audience. The
photographs were also thought to make an important contribution to
the representation of the human figure, appealing to modern
artists.