“He was provoking all these symptoms he had wanted to cure”: Nina Shope, author of Asylum

How have power dynamics between doctors and patients changed over the past century and a half? In my second and final interview with Nina Shope, author of the award-winning historical novel Asylum, we talk about the complicated relationship between neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his most famous patient as he treated her for hysteria and documented her in photographs during the 1870s. Nina reflects on the photograph of Augustine that she chose to include in her novel, how she avoided flattening historical figures or reducing Augustine to past trauma, and the mythological roots in both the history of female madness and Charcot’s photography.

Nina Shope, Asylum

Nina Shope, “Changeling.” Conjunctions, Vol. 81 (“Numina: The Enchantment Issue), Fall 2023

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Maud Casey, The City of Incurable Women

Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière

Euripides, The Bacchae

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho

Emily Wells, A Matter of Appearance