First published in 2022, Maud Casey's City of Incurable Women is a novel comprised of a collection of short stories that collectively tell the story of women who have been institutionalized in Paris, France's Salpêtrière mental hospital. For many women suffering from mental illnesses, Salpêtrière hospital was their last stop. They were put in Salpêtrière only after they were deemed incurable by doctors specializing in mental health-related conditions. Each story in Casey's novel is similar: she tries to show how each of the women was more than their mental illness. They were by and large good people affected by their mental illness, which none of them could stop. At the end of the day, they were people and not statistics, something many doctors at the time forgot or actively ignored. The antagonist of the novel, Jean-Martin Charcot, is the worst of those doctors. He treats each of the other women under his care with sheer contempt and often abuses them in many ways. He often subjects them to horrible experimentation.
City of Incurable Women did not sell many copies upon its publication. It also received mixed-to-negative reviews from the public and mixed reviews from critics. Some readers didn't like Casey's book because they thought it was meaningless and devoid of entertainment value. Kirkus Reviews received the book more favorably. In their review, they called the book "A strongly conceived, though inconsistently rendered, scrapbook from a dark chapter of the belle epoque."
