The Madwomen of Paris Author:Jennifer Cody Epstein Two women fall under the influence of a powerful doctor in Paris’s notorious nineteenth-century women’s asylum—a gripping novel inspired by true events. After being dragged into the Salpêtrière asylum screaming, covered in blood, and suffering from amnesia, Josephine is diagnosed with what the nineteenth-cen... more »tury Parisian press has dubbed “the epidemic of the age”: hysteria. It’s a disease so uniquely baffling that Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpêtrière’s acclaimed director, devotes popular lectures to it, using hypnosis to elicit fits and fantastical symptoms in front of rapt audiences. Young, charismatic, and highly susceptible to this entrancement, Josephine quickly becomes a favorite of the powerful doctor and the Parisian public alike.« less