City of Incurable Women

Once an armory, the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital became a hospice for poor women in 1656. Over the years, it housed the indigent, the mentally ill, the erotic, the epileptic, and the inconvenient women of Paris. Casey (The Man Who Walked Away) draws from the hospital’s history and provides listeners with vignettes of women who were kept there to be studied by the famous Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. Narrator Hope Newhouse breathes life into these women with her immaculate French accent and expert use of pacing. Newhouse speeds up and slows down much in the way the characters would have told their own stories, artfully using sotto voce to add authenticity. Listeners will miss the pictures and documents that are a part of the printed book, but those looking at the images will miss hearing the voices of these unfortunate women telling their own stories.