Keeping the fire burning: Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Richer, Charles Féré and Alfred Binet.

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) was the one of the world's leading physicians during the final third of the 19th century. Rewarded in 1882 with the creation of the first chair in the diseases of the nervous system, he was extremely successful at recruiting loyal and talented students. Charcot himself never produced a general treatise on hysteria, but instead encouraged his pupils to write their own books. Here, we describe how the work on hysteria of Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Richer, Charles Féré and Alfred Binet was closely associated with Charcot, and how they remained faithful to their mentor. We will highlight the unusual personality of G. Gilles de la Tourette and the tragic end to his life, the exceptional artistic talent of P. Richer (writer and painter of his magnificently illustrated thesis), the prolific writing capacity of C. Féré (bearing witness to his broad fields of interest) and A. Binet (blessed with an extraordinary capacity for work, and author of The Psychology of Reasoning, before presenting his metric scale of intelligence).