Louise Augustine Gleizes (born August 21, 1861), known as Augustine or A, was a very famous woman in the 1800s, due to neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot publicly exhibiting her symptoms as a hysteria patient while she was held at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.[1][2] She was a former kitchen maid, and was sent to the hospital at age fourteen on October 21, 1875.[2][3] Prior to that, she had been in a nurse's care in early life, and after the nurse in a religious boarding school where she suffered corporal punishment.[4] She was molested when she was ten years old, and she was raped by her mother’s lover when she was thirteen.[5]
While she was a patient of the Salpêtrière Hospital, Charcot, who treated her, would hypnotize her so she would demonstrate her supposed hysteria.[2] Sigmund Freud and Edgar Degas, among others, came to see this.[2] Photographs were taken of her then, which became famous.[2] She eventually did not allow Charcot to hypnotize her, and not long after this, in 1880, she escaped the hospital, disguised in men's clothes.[6] After that she was never seen again.[2] Charcot's work with her made him more famous, and he remains best remembered for it.[2]
A 2012 French historical drama film, Augustine, is about a love affair between Charcot and Gleizes.[2][6][7][8] In reality, there was no sexual relationship between her and Charcot.[6]
The play Photographs of A by Daniel Keene, about her, was performed in 2014 at Melbourne Theatre Company’s NEON Festival.[2][9]
Volume 2 of the Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, published in 1878.