As soon as I became a doctor, I left London with the intention of walking Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) back to life. Charcot had the genius to make clinical phenomena visible that no one else had even noticed. I arrived in Paris in 1972 hoping that he could teach me to visualise patterns that my mind did not yet know.Charcot had first appreciated the opportunities for research at the Hospice de la Vieillesse-Femmes de la Salpêtrière, in Paris, duringthe last year of his internship. In his thesis, where he described ways of differentiating chronic rheumatism from gout, he revealed the anatomo-clinical method that would be fundamental to his work. Practising nosography, as he referred to it, depended on the meticulous correlation of symptoms and signs with pathology. On leaving the Hospice to become Pierre Rayer's chefde clinique at L'H?pital de la Charité, he is reputed to have said, 'I must return here one day and then stay'. At the age of 37, he achieved his wish when he was appointed chefde service at La Salpêtrière: "The clinical types available for study are represented by numerous examples, which enable us to study categorical disease during its entire course, so to speak, since the vacancies that occur in any specific disease are quickly filled in the course of time. We are, in other words, in possession of a sort of museum of living pathology of which resources are great."
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