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This article explores the allure of "great men" in medical history through a comparative account of the work and lives of Jean-Martin Charcot and his student and collaborator, Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, in late nineteenth-century France. While historians of science and medicine have self-consciously rejected Whiggish and hagiographic "great man" history, the fixity of certain historical actors within our social and cultural histories reveals the continued hold of these figures and what they stand for within the grand narrative. The privileging of institutional and intellectual contributions has been perpetuated in such a way that bottom-up experiences and contributions in realms such as public health have been neglected. I argue that the continued prominence of certain historical medical figures, like Charcot, over forgotten contemporaries, like Bourneville, is representative of the way that historians of science and medicine have implicitly privileged intellectual contributions over social, political, or structural contributions.

Résumé. Cet article explore l'attrait pour les « grands hommes ¼ dans l'histoire de la médecine, en comparant la vie et l'œuvre de Jean-Martin Charcot et de son élève et collaborateur, Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, dans la France de la fin du XIXe siècle. Bien que le milieu de l'histoire des sciences et de la médecine ait plus ou moins rejeté les approches historiques fondées sur le whiggisme et l'hagiographie des « grands hommes ¼, la permanence de certains acteurs historiques dans notre histoire sociale et culturelle révèle l'emprise que ces figures conservent sur les grands récits et le rôle qu'elles continuent d'y jouer. Le privilège accordé aux contributions institutionnelles et intellectuelles s'est perpétué, de telle sorte que les expériences et les apports provenant de la base dans des domaines comme la santé publique sont demeurés dans l'ombre. Je soutiens ici que l'attention reçue sans cesse par certains personnages de l'histoire de la médecine, tel Charcot, au détriment de leurs contemporains ayant sombré dans l'oubli, tel Bourneville, est représentative de la manière dont les historiens et les historiennes des sciences et de la médecine privilégient toujours, implicitement, les contributions intellectuelles plutôt que les contributions sociales, politiques ou structurelles.

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While nineteenth-century regular physicians were expected to project a circumscribed affect in the exercise of their duties, they were not always successful in maintaining this performance. Archival sources, particularly the manuscript casebook for private practice, reveal the slippage between the performance of appropriate affect and the felt, interior emotions of the physician. This essay frames the casebook as an affective genre, building on Gianna Pomata's concept of epistemic genre. I argue that the nineteenth-century casebook, particularly when compared with the published case narrative, can reveal the disjunction or slippage between the expected performance of affect-that which Osler and others wished to prescribe for medical practitioners-and the felt reality or interiority of the physician. This article proposes the concept of affective genre and then explores its utility through close analysis of the casebook of a single practitioner, Andrew Bowles Holder, and selected examples from the casebooks of his contemporaries.

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Literary and medical historical scholars have long explored the work of physician-writers and the cross-pollination of literature and medicine. However, few scholars have considered how these interactions have shaped medical manuscripts and the echoes they contain of the emotional contours of the medical encounter. This essay uses the papers of Southern physician Andrew Bowles Holder (1860-1896) to explore how the emotions of the physician were managed at the bedside and in the aftermath of medical encounters through recourse to literary thinking. Holder, like many 19th-century physicians, was an avid reader with an interest in literary endeavours, and his manuscripts reveal the influences of literature on his work as a physician. This article frames the bedside as a theatre of emotions, in which Holder's performance and management of his emotions was key to his professional identity. His literary interests thus provided him with two tools: first, literature provided him with models for how to respond to and record different kinds of medical encounters, particularly deaths, near-death experiences and childbirth; second, his mode of keeping these records, which included the production of poetry as well as medical prose, served as a technology of coping, further allowing him to manage his emotions by exorcising them on the page.

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This essay explores the uses of phrenological theory in the realm of jurisprudence between the mid-1830s and 1850s, focusing in particular on the adoption and circulation of phrenological language within medico-legal circles through this period. The article begins by contextualizing medical jurisprudence in early America; at the same time that phrenology was gaining ground in the United States, theories of medical jurisprudence were in flux. I next turn to the concept of the propensities in phrenological theory and their relationship to theories of moral insanity developed in the same period. This article concludes with an exploration of explicit and implicit uses of phrenology, focusing on court cases featuring phrenological expertise or language. The article thus suggests both the uses of phrenology for the building of medico-legal expertise and the extent to which phrenological language around the propensities inflected lay and medico-legal discourse around criminal responsibility and insanity.

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In 1939, an unusual card game, Physogs, debuted in the United Kingdom. Based on physiognomic principles, it instructed players as to how to read and construct facial features and character types. Thirty years later, a new form of composite facial recognition, Photofit, was incorporated into the practice of the British police. Both projects, Physogs and Photofit, were the brainchild of one man, Jacques Penry, representing his twentieth-century iteration of physiognomy. How did a card game become an origin point for a new approach to policing?