Treating hysterics - and mistreating them

Augustine is a French film about the Dr. (or M.) Charcot and his pioneering treatment of female hysteria in Paris in the 19th century - particularly his treatment of a patient, the eponymous Augustine, a house maid who has seizures and fits, during which she writhes and cries out as if in violent and fevered sexual orgasm. Not sure how much is based on fact, but Charcot was a famous practitioner, whom Freud admired - his great insight was that the treated hysteria as a curable disease or illness, and not as a form of witchery or possession. The insight that he didn't have - and that Freud did have - was that hysteria was an illness of the mind, not just of the brain - so he never engaged in anything remotely like psychotherapy in any form. He barely talks to his patients, treats them as objects of study and of display - he worked with A. to "train" her to undergo hypnosis and fall into fits on command, for demonstrations before other doctors, in his efforts to seek more funding for his work. So he's both a hero - helping these women whom society had ignored or worse - and a brute, especially to Augustine (in one horrid scene he penetrates her with some kind of medieval looking torture device). Gradually, he comes to develop a bit of tenderness for A., but they never engage in any serious dialogue - she, by the way, is illiterate and very taciturn. The actress - Soko - is very good, btw, and her sexual fits are the kind of scenes that often bring an actor an Oscar nomination, but probably not in this case, as she hardly says a thing throughout the film. Up to a point, I found it a very captivating and provocative look at early medical treatment and the ethical issues surrounding treatment of the mentally ill - but then the movie goes off the rails near the end (spoiler). Why does the director, Alice Winocour, have Charcot have crude sex with Augustine after one of her fits? I doubt he would do so - I hope he wouldn't - but it seems she does this just to make a feminst point: the doctor is a brute, weak willed, exploitative, horrid. Augustine - apparently "cured" before the sex scene - runs away from the asylum, and we wonder whether his attack on her (though she came on to him, she's obviously sick and vulnerable and he took advantage from his position of power and health) ruined all of the progress he had made - we suspect she was not wakened to sexuality in some pseudo-Laurentian way but rather frightened and distraught by this attack and maybe reverted to hysteria or worse. Seems needless point-making, and, hard as it may be to imagine a French movie without a sex scene, the film would have been stronger had it been less sensational.