Maud Casey’s City of Incurable Women (2022) is a haunting, lyrical work of historical fiction that reimagines the lives of women confined to the Salpêtrière Hospital in 19th-century Paris—an infamous asylum where thousands of women deemed “mad,” “hysterical,” or socially deviant were studied, displayed, and silenced under the guise of science. Blending history, imagination, and poetic reflection, Casey resurrects these forgotten women, transforming their suffering and erasure into acts of narrative defiance. The result is less a conventional novel than a collage of voices—part historical testimony, part literary requiem—that challenges how madness, femininity, and desire have been defined by patriarchal power.
The book centers on the real-life figure of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, a pioneering neurologist and the so-called “father of modern neurology,” whose clinical lectures on hysteria at the Salpêtrière turned the suffering of women into spectacle. Charcot’s patients—poor, abandoned, and often traumatized—were photographed, exhibited, and analyzed in front of audiences of male doctors, artists, and intellectuals. Among these women, Casey gives voice to several, including the famous Augustine, Blanche, and Geneviève, whose images became iconic representations of hysteria. By reconstructing their fragmented histories, Casey seeks to restore individuality and agency to those reduced to medical curiosities.
The narrative unfolds through a mosaic of perspectives—letters, case notes, imagined monologues, and lyrical fragments. This fragmented form mirrors the fragmentation of the women’s identities under institutional control. Casey’s prose moves between the clinical and the poetic: one moment capturing the detached tone of scientific observation, the next entering the fevered interior of a mind yearning for freedom. The women’s voices emerge in defiance of erasure, whispering through time to demand recognition. In doing so, Casey transforms archival silence into a chorus of resistance.
As the title suggests, the “City of Incurable Women” becomes both a literal and metaphorical space. It represents the hospital itself—a microcosm of a society that pathologized female emotion and rebellion—but also the broader world that continues to label women’s anger, grief, and desire as forms of illness. Through her reconstruction, Casey critiques the historical alignment between science and control, showing how diagnoses of hysteria were often ways to discipline women who defied social norms. The novel thus bridges past and present, inviting readers to question how the language of medicine and psychology still carries traces of this gendered bias.
Stylistically, City of Incurable Women reads like a prose poem—dense, impressionistic, and filled with imagery of confinement, light, and the body. Rather than impose a linear plot, Casey evokes atmosphere and emotion, creating a space where ghosts of the past can speak in fragments. Her use of repetition, rhythm, and silence gives the text a musical quality, mirroring the cyclical nature of memory and trauma. The historical realism of the setting intertwines with a dreamlike lyricism, allowing history and imagination to coexist in a shared act of mourning and reclamation.
Ultimately, City of Incurable Women is a meditation on voice, memory, and power. Maud Casey restores humanity to women who were stripped of it, crafting a deeply empathetic portrait of resistance through storytelling. The novel stands as both an artistic and political act—challenging how history records women’s suffering and asserting the enduring need to listen to those the world calls incurable. Through Casey’s luminous prose, silence becomes speech, and the forgotten are remembered not as objects of study, but as witnesses to their own enduring truth.
