File:Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (24894954213).jpg

original painting by André Brouillet ....Although rather undistinguished artistically, the painting is remarkable historically speaking: eminent French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is in the middle delivering a clinical demonstration at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. to his left a patient is convulsing and assuming the arc en circle, or Opisthotonus posture .. this young lady is held by Charcot's chief house physician neurologist Joseph Babinski, discoverer of the Babinski sign. among the audience there are three distinctive figures: standing to the left is Charcot's son, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, at the time a medical student and, later, a polar explorer. He died when his ship the Pourquoi-Pas was wrecked in a storm off the coast of Iceland in 1936. sitting near the window, Pierre Marie, also a French neurologist, who was the first to describe a disorder of the pituitary gland known as acromegaly or gigantism in layman's terms.