Personalizing illness and modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, literary women, and neurasthenia, 1870-1914

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 79, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 695-722

  Schuster, David G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Amelia Gere Mason; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Culture; Doctor patient relationship; Gender; History; Medicine; S. Weir Mitchell; Sarah Butler Wister

Indexed keywords

DOCTOR PATIENT RELATION; FEMALE; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; HUMAN; LITERATURE; NEURASTHENIA; NEUROLOGY; PATERNALISM; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; REVIEW; TIME; WOMEN'S HEALTH;

FEMALE; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; LITERATURE, MODERN; MEDICINE IN LITERATURE; NEURASTHENIA; NEUROLOGY; PATERNALISM; PHYSICIAN-PATIENT RELATIONS; TIME FACTORS; WOMEN'S HEALTH;

EID: 30344445126     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2005.0172     Document Type: Review

References (203)

1. Amelia Gere Mason to S. Weir Mitchell, 6 December 1897, Mitchell Papers, series 4.3, box 9, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pa. (hereafter referred to as MP-CPP). All future references to the Mason-Mitchell letters come from the same series and box.
2. Amelia Gere Mason to S. Weir Mitchell, 1897, Mitchell Papers, series 4.3, Ibid.
3. E. H. Van Deusen, "Observations on a Form of Nervous Prostration, (Neurasthenia,) Culminating in Insanity," Amer. J. Insan., 1869, 15:445-61;
4. George M. Beard, "Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion," Boston Med. & Surg. J., 1869, 3: 217-21.
5. Beard's best-known work on neurasthenia was American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (1881; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972). For a concise account of Beard's life and work,
6. see Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Place of George M. Beard in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry," Bull. Hist. Med., 1962, 36:245-59.
7. Physicians often expressed amazement at neurasthenia's popularity, both as an illness and as a topic of discussion among Americans. See I. N. Love, "Neurasthenia," JAMA, 1894, 22: 539-44
8. (excerpts reprinted in JAMA, 1994, 271: 1242);
9. Charles L. Dana, "The Partial Passing of Neurasthenia," Boston Med. & Surg. J., 1904, 150:339-44;
10. G. Alder Blumer, "The Coming of Psychasthenia," J. Nerv. & Ment. Dis., 1906, 33:336-53.
11. Donna B. Greenberg, "Neurasthenia in the 1980s: Chronic Mononucleosis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Anxiety and Depressive Disorders," Psychosomatics, 1990, 31: 129-37;
12. Susan A. Abby and Paul E. Garfinkel, "Neurasthenia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: The Role of Culture in the Making of a Diagnosis," Amer. J. Psychiatry, 1991, 148: 1638-46;
13. Edward Shorter, "Chronic Fatigue in Historical Perspective," Ciba Found. Symp., 1993, 173: 6-22;
14. F. M. Corrigan et al., "Neurasthenic Fatigue, Chemical Sensitivity and GABAa Receptor Toxins," Med. Hypoth., 1994, 43:195-200.
15. Joan Brumberg has suggested that early cases of anorexia nervosa were sometimes diagnosed as neurasthenia, in Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
16. Love, "Neurasthenia" (n. 4). O. Henry's short story on neurasthenia is also a good illustration of people's growing belief that the condition was nothing more than an absurd celebration of invalidism:
17. O. Henry, Adventures in Neurasthenia: Let Me Feel Your Pulse (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1910).
18. Dana, "Partial Passing of Neurasthenia" (n. 4);
19. Blumer, "Coming of Psychasthenia" (n. 4);
20. John E. Donely, "On Neurasthenia as a Disintegration of Personality,"J. Abnor. Psychol., 1906, 1: 55-68.
21. For a good overview of the medical literature surrounding neurasthenia and its demographics, see F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870-1910 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
22. Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, ed. François Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 2000), pp. 321-50.
23. Even though Dr. George Beard nicknamed neurasthenia the "American Disease," Europeans and Japanese also employed the diagnosis, and Chinese physicians were still identifying the condition in the late twentieth century. See Arthur Kleinman, Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) ;
24. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990);
25. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (New York: Rodopi, 2001);
26. Laura Goering, "'Russian Nervousness': Neurasthenia and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Russia," Med. Hist., 2003, 47: 23-46;
27. Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
28. Those who understood neurasthenia as a social tool to control women include Ann Douglas Wood, "'The Fashionable Diseases': Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America," J. Interdiscip. Hist., 1973, 4:25-52;
29. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (New York: Feminist Press, 1973);
30. and Suzanne Poirier, "The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctors and Patients," Women's Studies, 1983, 10:15-40.
31. The term "bargaining with patriarchy" comes from Deniz Kandiyoti, "Bargaining with Patriarchy," Gender & Soc., 1988, 2:274-90,
32. and is applicable to John S. Haller, "Neurasthenia: The Medical Profession and the 'New Woman' of the Late Nineteenth Century," New York State J. Med., 1971, 71: 473-82;
33. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America," Soc. Res., 1972, 39:653-78;
34. and Regina Markell Morantz, "The Lady and Her Physician," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 38-53
35. (an expanded version of Morantz's earlier article "The Perils of Feminist History,"J. Interdise. Hist., 1974, 4:649-60). As for using neurasthenia as a source of agency,
36. see Nancy M. Theriot, "Women's Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step toward Deconstructing Science," Signs, 1993, 19:1-31.
37. Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971);
38. Barbara Sicherman, "The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia," in Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 22-35;
39. Gosling, Before Freud (n. 8) ;
40. Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1992);
41. Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994);
42. Simon Wessely, "Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes," in A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origins and History of Psychiatric Disorders, ed. German E. Berrios and Roy Porter (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 509-32;
43. Eric Caplan, Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). For works linking neurasthenia with more recent diagnoses, see n. 5 above.
44. Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991);
45. Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993);
46. Jennifer Shannon Tuttle, "Empire of Sickness: Literary Professionals and Medical Discourse in the Age of American Nervousness, 1869-1911" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1996);
47. Barbara Will, "The Nervous Origins of the American Western," Amer. Lit., 1998, 70:293-316;
48. Rebecca Charlotte Hyman, "Territories of the Self: Nervous Disease and the Social Logic of Pre-Freudian Subjectivity" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1998).
49. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981);
50. George Frederick Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady, and the Victorians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984);
51. Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);
52. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
53. Kathleen Spies, "Figuring the Neurasthenic: Thomas Eakins, Nervous Illness, and Gender in Victorian America," Nineteenth-Cent. Stud., 1998, 12:85-109.
54. Gijswijt-Hofstra and Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia (n. 10).
55. Thomas Stephen Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961);
56. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (New York: Harper & Row, 1970);
57. David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971);
58. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973);
59. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994);
60. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
61. Lutz, American Nervousness (n. 13);
62. Tom Lutz, "Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes," in Berrios and Porter, eds., History of Clinical Psychiatry (n. 12), pp. 533-44;
63. Morantz, "Lady and Her Physician" (n. 11);
64. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
65. Morantz-Sanchez, "Negotiating Power at the Bedside: Historical Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Patients and Their Gynecologists," Fem. Studies, 2000, 26: 287-309;
66. Sicherman, "Uses of a Diagnosis" (n. 12);
67. Theriot, "Women's Voices" (n. 11).
68. Lears, No Place of Grace (n. 14), also recognizes patients' influence on the construction of neurasthenia.
69. Recent works that have relied on patient records include Theriot, "Women's Voices" (n. 11);
70. Hilary Marland, "'Uterine Mischief: W. S. Playfair and His Neurasthenic Patients," in Gijswijt-Hofstra and Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia (n. 10), pp. 117-39;
71. Joachim Radkau, "The Neurasthenic Experience in Imperial Germany: Expeditions into Patient Records and Side-looks upon General History,", Cultures of Neurasthenia, ibid., pp. 199-217. Lutz relied on articles written by physicians to get at the evolving place of the doctor-patient relationship within neurasthenia's multifaceted history;
72. see Tom Lutz, "Varieties of Medical Experience: Doctors and Patients, Psyche and Soma in America,", Cultures of Neurasthenia, ibid., pp. 51-79.
73. Lutz, "Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes" (n. 17), p. 542.
74. For an account of mid-nineteenth-century American physicians studying in France, and the professional reputations they cultivated as a result, see John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
75. S. Weir Mitchell, George R. Morehouse, and William W. Keen, Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1864).
76. College of Physicians of Philadelphia, S. WeirMitchell(1829-1914): Memorial Addresses and Resolutions (Philadelphia: College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1914);
77. Lawrence C. McHenry, Garrison's History of Neurology (Springfield, 111.: Thomas, 1969), p. 327. For a useful, albeit uncritical, overview of Mitchell's career,
78. see Ernest Earnest, S. Weir Mitchell: Novelist and Physician (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1950).
79. S. Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear, or, Hints for the Overworked, 4th ed. (1887; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1973). Linking illness to progress has been a common practice in Western society for centuries;
80. see Charles E. Rosenberg, "Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk," Bull. Hist. Med., 1998, 72: 714-30.
81. S. Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood and How to Make Them (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1878). It should be noted that men were occasionally prescribed the rest cure, even though it has developed a reputation as a women's cure.
82. One of the most vocal opponents to women's full participation in academic life was Dr. Edward Clarke, a professor of medicine at Harvard, whose ironically titled book Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston: Osgood, 1873) was at the center of late nineteenth-century debate over women's education. For a good overview of the scientific community's belief in sexual difference during the nineteenth century,
83. see Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
84. S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), p. 138.
85. S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, 1888, Ibid., pp. 139-40.
86. Morantz also recognized Mitchell's respect for "educated, intelligent, strong-minded women" in her essay "The Lady and Her Physician" (n. 11), p. 42. In addition to Mitchell's longtime relationship with Amelia Gere Mason and Sarah Butler Wister, he also carried on a lifelong friendship with Agnes Irwin, the first dean of Radcliffe College. Archival evidence suggests that people capitalized on his respect for knowledgeable women to ask favors of him. The minister, reformer, and author Edward Everett Hale wrote him a personal letter asking him to treat a family friend. In the letter, Hale tried to entice Mitchell by showcasing his friend's intellectual qualities: "She is a singularly well educated lady, with a real passion for natural sciences, on using the microscope - in botany - and in geology. She is a leader among all the amateur students and is ... feted and esteemed by our best scientific men" (Edward E. Hale to S. Weir Mitchell, 8 May 1898, MP-CPP, series 4.3, box 8, folder 2).
87. Although her 1891 work Women of the French Salons is widely available in electronic form, there is remarkably little biographical information available on Amelia Gere Mason. Who Was Who in America (1942), p. 785, has a short biography; Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, South Hadley, Mass., has a small Mason biographical file (class of 1851) ;
88. and Mason infused some episodes from her own life into the biography she wrote of Emily Eames MacVaegh entitled Memories of a Friend (Chicago: Woodworth, 1918).
89. Mason, Memories of a Friend (n. 29), p. 15.
90. Muriel Beadle, The Fortnightly of Chicago, the City and Its Women: 1873-1973 (Chicago: Regnery, 1973), pp. 3-4;
91. Mason, Memories of a Friend (n. 29), p. 53.
92. Mason, Memories of a Friend (n. 29), pp. 41-42.
93. Who Was Who in America (n. 29), p. 785;
94. Amelia Gere Mason, The Women of the French Salons (New York: Century, 1891).
95. Mason, Memories of a Friend (n. 29), pp. 14-15.
96. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 279, 301-2.
97. Mason, Memories of a Friend (n. 29), p. 57. Maureen Flanagan has also recognized the importance of women in Chicago's reconstruction and the development of a civic culture:
98. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
99. Mason to Mitchell, 17 February 1912, MP-CPP.
100. Ibid.
101. These letters are currendy held in MP-CPP, series 4.3, box 9.
102. Mason to Mitchell, 25 April 1907, MP-CPP.
103. Mason to Mitchell, 17 March 1892, MP-CPP.
104. Mason to Mitchell, 6 December 1897, MP-CPP.
105. Mason to Mitchell, 10 November 1899, MP-CPP.
106. Mason to Mitchell, 28 December 1912, MP-CPP.
107. Mason to Mitchell, 25 April 1907, MP-CPP.
108. Ibid.
109. By observing and assessing her psychological state - her "soul" - Mason seems to have been following in the spirit of the "new psychology" movement that was gaining ground in America during this time, represented by figures such as William James, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall. Mason was well aware of James, for she mentioned him in a handful of letters to Mitchell. For more on turn-of-the-century "new psychology," see Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 137-70.
110. Mason to Mitchell, 27 December 1886, MP-CPP.
111. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
112. Mason to Mitchell, 10 February 1911, MP-CPP.
113. Mason to Mitchell, 27 December 1886, MP-CPP.
114. Ibid.
115. Mason to Mitchell, 7 July 1892, MP-CPP.
116. Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
117. Mason to Mitchell, 9 January 1912, MP-CPP (emphasis in the original).
118. Mitchell, Wear and Tear (n. 23), pp. 8-9;
119. Mason, Memories of a Friend (n. 29), pp. 14-15.
120. Mason to Mitchell, 2 January 1911, 1 August 1912, 14 October 1912, MP-CPP.
121. Lears outlines antimodernism in No Place of Grace (n. 14).
122. Mitchell, Fat and Blood (n. 24). Interestingly, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has likened some cases of neurasthenia to a sort of nineteenth-century anorexia: neurasthenics were typically thought of as skinny, malnourished, and victims of improper eating habits.
123. See Brumberg, Fasting Girls (n. 5).
124. Mitchell, Fat and Blood (n. 24), p. 42.
125. James Jackson Putnam, "Remarks on the Psychical Treatment of Neurasthenia," Boston Med. & Surg. J., 1895, 132:505-11.
126. Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (n. 26), p. 88.
127. Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, (n. 26), Ibid., p. 173. George Cotkin has observed that hobbies such as these, especially photography, were thought to be feminine activities in the late nineteenth century:
128. see Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992).
129. S. Weir Mitchell, Roland Blake (New York: Century, 1915). Although this strategy may seem a superficial cure to some therapists today, one must keep in mind that facing personal psychological problems did not became a widely accepted form of therapy until the arrival of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic strategies in the twentieth century.
130. See Gosling, Before Freud (n. 8);
131. Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue (n. 12).
132. Mitchell to Mason, 12 [no month] 1900, MP-CPP.
133. Mason to Mitchell, 16 September 1912, MP-CPP.
134. Mason to Mitchell, 17 February 1912, MP-CPP.
135. Mason to Mitchell, 30 November 1911, MP-CPP.
136. Mason, Women of the French Salons (n. 33), p. v.
137. Earnest, S. Weir Mitchell (n. 22), pp. 73, 130.
138. The best published source on Sarah Butler Wister's life is Fanny Kemble Wister, ed., That I May Tell You: Journals and Letters of the Owen Wister Family (Wayne, Pa.: Haverford House, 1979).
139. Fanny Kemble Wister, That I May Tell You: Journals and Letters of the Owen Wister Family, 1979, Ibid., pp. 3, 7.
140. Mrs. O. J. Wister and Agnes Irwin, eds., Worthy Women of Our First Century (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877). Although Irwin and Mitchell had opposing views on what constituted the proper education for young women, the two knew each other and kept up a friendly correspondence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
141. Sarah Butler Wister to S. Weir Mitchell, 18 August 1897, MP-CPP, series 4.3, box 9. All future references to the Wister-Mitchell letters come from the same series and box.
142. Wister, That I May Tell You (n. 71), pp. 11-12.
143. Wister, That I May Tell You (n. 71), Ibid., pp. 11, 13.
144. Wister, That I May Tell You (n. 71), Ibid., p. 13.
145. Information on Owen Wister Jr.'s illness can be found in Will, "Nervous Origins" (n. 13). Reference to Wister's sister-in-law comes from Fanny Kemble Wister, ed., "Sarah Butler Wister's Civil War Diary," Pennsylvania Mag. Hist. & Biog., 1978, 102: 271-327, on p. 278.
146. Wister to Mitchell, 16 February 1904, MP-CPP. (Note that Earnest's biography of Mitchell incorrectly dates this letter as 6 February 1904.)
147. Wister to Mitchell, 19 June 1898, MP-CPP.
148. Wister to Mitchell, 23 March 1898, MP-CPP.
149. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs, 1975, 1:1-29, on p. 5.
150. Wister to Mitchell, 29 July 1897, MP-CPP;
151. Wister, That I May Tell You (n. 71), p. 11.
152. Wister to Mitchell, Saturday, 13 October (no year, but most likely 1900, when DaCosta died), MP-CPP.
153. For a general overview of women's dedication to housework and the physical and mental toll it exacted, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
154. Wister to Mitchell, no date (although probably 1896 or 1897), MP-CPP.
155. Wister to Mitchell, 19 June 1903, MP-CPP.
156. Wister, "Sarah Butler Wister's Civil War Diary" (n. 78), p. 290.
157. Wister, "Sarah Butler Wister's Civil War Diary" (n. 78), Ibid., p. 296.
158. Wister, "Sarah Butler Wister's Civil War Diary" (n. 78), Ibid., p. 296.
159. Wister, "Sarah Butler Wister's Civil War Diary" (n. 78), Ibid., p. 296.
160. Historian Daniel Rodgers has found that American workers in the nineteenth century also used neurasthenia as a reason to take breaks from work; the professor of medical anthropology Arthur Kleinman and the sinologist Joan Kleinman have found a similar use of neurasthenia one hundred years later in late twentieth-century China. Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 102-14;
161. Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, "Somatization: The Inter-connections in Chinese Society among Culture, Depressive Experiences, and the Meanings of Pain," in Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, ed. Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 429-90.
162. Will, "Nervous Origins" (n. 13).
163. Wister to Mitchell, 3 September 1893, MP-CPP. As mentioned earlier, Mitchell often prescribed painting to his patients:
164. see Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (n. 26), pp. 167-68.
165. Wister to Mitchell, 22 September 1895, MP-CPP.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid.
168. Virginia Woolf, also a neurasthenic, famously elaborated on this same theme more than thirty years later in A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929)
169. and Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938).
170. Wister to Mitchell, 10 August 1897, MP-CPP.
171. Ibid.
172. Wister to Mitchell, 28 September 1903, MP-CPP.
173. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has made similar observations about the role hysteria played in allowing women to escape, avoid, and redefine their domestic roles. See Smith-Rosenberg, "Hysterical Woman" (n. 11).
174. Wister to Mitchell, 12 June 1902, MP-CPP.
175. Wister to Mitchell, 22 April 1900, MP-CPP.
176. One cannot help but think of Wister's vacation habit as part of the modern culture of consumption that was enticing neurasthenics through advertisements for products -and holidays - to ensure good health. See, e.g., T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 137-258;
177. Gosling, Before Freud (n. 8), pp. 108-42;
178. Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York: Norton, 1979).
179. Germany also appears to have cultivated a culture of consumption among neurasthenics: see Heinze-Peter Schmiedebach's excellent essay "The Public's View of Neurasthenia in Germany: Looking for a New Rhythm of Life," in Gijswijt and Porter, Cultures of Neurasthenia (n. 10), pp. 219-38.
180. Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5.
181. For instance, see Wood, "'Fashionable Diseases'" (n. 11);
182. Ehrenreich and English, Complaints and Disorders (n. 11);
183. Poirier, "The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure" (n. 11);
184. Jeffrey Berman, The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University Press, 1985);
185. Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards, eds., introduction to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 3-23;
186. Will, "Nervous Origins" (n. 13).
187. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935; reprint, New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), p. 91.
188. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, 1975; Ibid., p. 95.
189. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, 1975; Ibid., p. 96.
190. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, 1975; Ibid., p. 96.
191. Part of the folklore surrounding "The Yellow Wallpaper" is that Gilman sent Mitchell a copy of the story in the hopes that he would read it and make his rest cure more humane; she claimed that her strategy worked and that Mitchell modified his therapy on her account. This story, however, is unsubstantiated, and Gilman's influence on Mitchell is questioned by Suzanne Poirier in "The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure" (n. 11)
192. and by Julie Bates Dock in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
193. Gilman, Living (n. 108), p. 90.
194. In particular, see Dianna T. Kenny, "Constructions of Chronic Pain in Doctor-Patient Relationships: Bridging the Communication Chasm," Patient Educ. & Counseling, 2004, 52:297-305.
195. Other works that address the importance of the doctor-patient relationship include Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Creskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2002);
196. Lynn Huffman, Foundations of Family Therapy: A Conceptual Framework for Systems Change (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
197. Gilman's more successful treatment under Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi (whom she visited fourteen years after Mitchell) was closer to Mason's and Wister's experience in that Gilman felt that she could work with her physician. As she had for Mitchell, she spent time preparing information about her illness to give Jacobi a "better understanding of the case," which Jacobi gratefully accepted. Unlike Mitchell, Jacobi made the effort to get to know Gilman personally and design a therapy with her unique needs in mind: rather than rest, she asked her to practice working while ill; see Gilman, Living (n. 108), pp. 290-91. Morantz-Sanchez also found rapport to be the crucial difference between Gilman's treatments under Mitchell and Jacobi:
198. see Sympathy and Science (n. 54), pp. 213-14. As F. G. Gosling and Hilary Marland have pointed out, even the decision of whether or not to apply the diagnosis of neurasthenia was often dependent on the physician's affinity with the patient:
199. see Gosling, Before Freud (n. 8), pp. 143-63;
200. Marland, "'Uterine Mischief (n. 18).
201. Christopher Lasch has made the connection between Addams's neurasthenia and her need for social activity in New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as Social Type (New York: Knopf, 1965). Addams herself famously made the connection between social work and the neurasthenic condition in her 1893 essay "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" that reappeared in her 1910 autobiography:
202. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999), pp. 90-96.
203. The therapeutic culture that Christopher Lasch identified in the second half of the twentieth century is much different from the therapeutic ethos of neurasthenia: Lasch's culture relied on experts to tell people how to live their lives, while the neurasthenic therapeutic ethos gave people greater license to live their lives according to personal standards. In both cases, there was a psychological need to feel better. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner Books, 1979).