NEURASTHENIA, GENDER AND A CULTURE OF NERVOUS

DEPLETION

Bath Spa, England

George Cheyne (1671-1743)The English Malady (1733)

“Neurasthenia” (coined 1869)

• Neuro— nerve

• Asthenia—weakness

• On analogy from anemia (lack of blood/iron)

Some of the shocks of modern civilization according to nervous disease specialists

MYOGRAPH

Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894)

“…the transmission of Nerve force along the motor nerve being just as dependent upon Chemical changes taking place between the substance of the Ganglionic centre from which it proceeds and the oxygenated Blood that circulates through it, as is the transmission of an Electric current along the Telegraph-wire upon the Chemical changes taking place between the metals and the exciting liquid of the Galvanic battery.”

William B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology (1875) (p. 14).

Thirteen Founders of the Association

of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions

for the Insane (1844-1891)

American Medico-Psychological

Association (1892-1919)and then

American Psychiatric Association (1920-today)

Chicago Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 1874 became the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

in 1876,and the official publicationOf the American Neurological Association

GEORGE MILLERBEARD

(1839-1883)

Portrait upon graduation from YaleCollege, 1862

Thomas Edison to George Beard, April 10, 1878, Courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives

Yale University

Modern Causes of Neurastheniaaccording to Beard

• steam power• the periodical press• the telegraph• the sciences• the mental activity of women

• Other causes: liberty, punctuality, cities, new ideas, railway travel, etc.

“…when new functions are interposed in the circuit, as modern civilization is constantly requiring us to do, there comes a period, sooner or later, varying in different individuals, and at different times of life, when the amount of force is insufficient to keep all the lamps actively burning; those that are weakest go out entirely, or, as more frequently happens, burn faint and feebly, they do not expire, but give an insufficient and unstable light—this is the philosophy of modern nervousness”

Beard, American Nervousness (1881) p.99

Galvanic Treatment of the Central Nervous System

Beard, Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (1889) p. 211

Beard’s General Faradization

Central Galvanization

SILAS WEIR MITCHELL (1829-1914)

The moral world of the sick-bed explains in a measure some of the things that are

strange in daily life, and the man who does not know sick women does not know

women."

S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (1895) p. 10

S. Weir Mitchell examining Civil War veteran

from Gosling, Before Freud

“These are the ‘bed cases,” the broken-down and exhausted women, the pests of many households, who

constitute the despair of physicians,and who furnish those annoying examples of despotic selfishness, which wreck the constitutions of nurses and devoted relatives,

and in unconscious or half-conscious self-indulgence destroy the comfort of every one around them.”

S. Weir Mitchell, Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, especially in Women, 1881, p. 218

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

“The Yellow Wallpaper”New England Magazine, Jan. 1892

“I am sitting by the window in this atrocious nursery”

Stranger Theatre, TorontoThe Yellow Wallpaper Project

Manhattan School of Music

Jenny Oakley“The Yellow Wallpaper”

Thomas Wilmer Dewing Lady in White (no. 2), ca. 1910

Smithsonian

Henry Ossawa TannerPortrait of the Artist's Wife, 1897

From, Women on the Verge: The Culture of Neurasthenia in 19th-Century America

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, 2004-2005

Thomas Eakins, American Realist Painter (1844-1916)

Amelia Van Buren,c. 1891

The Artist’s Wife and his Setter Dog1884-1886

Marcel Proust (Adrien’s Proust’s son)

(1871-1922)

Achille-Adrian Proust and Ballet, L’hygiène du neurasthénique (1897)