Étienne-Jean Georget

Georget was born in Vernou-sur-Brenne (Indre-et-Loire), into a poor farming family. He was poorly educated, which he felt handicapped his career. He studied medicine in Tours, then in Paris where he was a student of Philippe Pinel and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol. From 1815 he worked at the Salpêtrière hospital. Georget ridiculed the idea of the uterine origin of hysteria and maintained that it was a disease of men as well as women. He was a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine and of the Medical Society of London. The theoretical work of Georget was influential in establishing the view that 19th century writers of romantic fiction took of the insane and of criminals. Georget died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 33. The Géricault portraits In the early 1820s, he commissioned Théodore Géricault, a former patient, to paint a series of portraits so that his students could study the facial traits of "monomaniacs", as he preferred using such images to having patients in the classroom. Between 1821 and 1824, Géricault created ten paintings, of which five have survived. a gambling addict, and a woman "consumed with envy". The most famous is Portrait of a kleptomaniac. == Works ==