Jean Avril was a dancer, the star of the Moulin Rouge of the 1890s, famous for her unique dancing style and strong character. Her legend is based both on her dramatic life and on the influence of her iconic figure on the Belle Epoque world. She charmed the great artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, they became close friends, and he introduced her in a series of colorful posters promoting the artistic world of the Montmartre cabaret.

But before she became a legend, Avril was called Jean Bodon. In 1882, at the age of 14, he was admitted to the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris with involuntary muscle movements and convulsions. The hospital changed her fate. This gave her a break from life with her alcoholic mother and gave her the opportunity to find her calling as a dancer. According to her, she discovered dance at an event organized at the hospital for patients and staff, and channeled her imagination and passion into it. With her life, Avril builds a bridge between her modern “sisters” who have adopted dance as a means of self-expression and understanding of themselves and the world, and countless marginalized women who have been branded as “hysterical” for centuries.

“Hysteria” as a medical term has long been used to refer to a behavioral disorder in women, a definition originating in Ancient Greece (the word “hysteria” is synonymous with the uterus and was used for all female mammals). For psychiatry, hysteria meant neurosis, manifested by temporary disturbances in thinking, sensations, movements, or even various more stable signs (paralysis, pain, convulsions, etc.). Interest in this particular condition as a cultural phenomenon peaked in the late 1800s, when several directors of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital viewed the mentally ill as subjects of their psychological and photographic studies of female hysteria.

More recently, American photographer Laura Larson created a photobook that returns to this theme. In The City of Incurable Women (Saint Lucy Books, 2022), she retells the story of hysteria drawing on archival material from the Salpêtrière and, with poetic reflections, contemporary photographs and historical documents, approaches the life experiences of women of that time.