Legacy
One of Charcot's greatest legacies as a clinician is his contribution to the development of systematic neurological examination, correlating a set of clinical signs with specific lesions. This was made possible by his pioneering long-term studies of patients, coupled with microscopic and anatomic analysis derived from eventual autopsies. This led to the first clear delineation of various neurological diseases and classic description of them, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Charcot is just as famous for his influence on those who had studied with him: Sigmund Freud, Joseph Babinski, Jean Leguirec, Pierre Janet, William James, Pierre Marie, Albert Londe, Charles-Joseph Bouchard, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Alfred Binet, and Albert Pitres. Among the doctors trained by Charcot at the beginning of the 20th century account the Spanish neuropathologists Nicolás Achúcarro and Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora, two distinguished disciples of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and members of the Spanish Neurological School.
Charcot bestowed the eponym for Tourette syndrome in honor of his student, Georges Gilles de la Tourette.
Although, by the 1870s, Charcot was France's best known physician, his ideas about hysteria were later refuted, and French psychiatry did not recover for decades. An example of the dismissal of Charcot's views can be found in Edward Shorter's History of Psychiatry: Shorter states that Charcot understood "almost nothing" about major psychiatric illness, and that he was "quite lacking in common sense and grandiosely sure of his own judgement". This perspective overlooks the fact that Charcot never claimed to be a psychiatrist or to be practising psychiatry, a field that was separately organized from neurology within France's educational and public health systems. After Charcot's death, the phenomenon of "hysteria" that he had described was no longer recognized as a real neurological condition, but was considered to be an "artifact of suggestion". However, Charcot continued to have a "prominent" position in French psychiatry and psychology.
The negative evaluation of Charcot's work on hysteria was influenced by a significant shift in diagnostic criteria and understanding of hysteria which occurred in the decades following his death. The historical perspective on Charcot's work on hysteria has also been distorted by viewing him as a precursor of Freud. After Charcot's death, Freud and Janet wrote articles on his importance. However, Charcot's work on hysteria and hypnotism was at odds with the perspective Freud made famous, since Charcot believed in neurological determinism.
The Charcot-Janet school, which formed from the work of Charcot and his student Janet, contributed greatly to knowledge of multiple personality disorders.
