neurasthenia, gender and a culture of nervous depletion
TRANSCRIPT
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)