This book recounts and interrogates the practices that came to light at the Salpêtrière, in Charcot's day, around hysteria. Through the clinical and experimental procedures, through hypnosis and the "presentations" of patients in the middle of a fit — the celebrated Tuesday lessons — one discovers a kind of astonishing theatricality, and the decisive part played by the camera in producing, framing and legitimating the very symptoms it claimed only to record.