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- Title
Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Literary Women, and Neurasthenia, 1870-1914.
- Authors
Schuster, David G.
- Abstract
This article examines how the affliction of neurasthenia, commonly diagnosed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, acted as a catalyst for intellectual and lifestyle changes during a time of modernization. At the center of the study are three individuals: neurologist S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) and two of his patients, critic and historian Amelia Gere Mason (1831-1923) and writer and homemaker Sarah Butler Wister (1835-1908). Using archived correspondence between Mitchell and his patients, this article seeks to reveal how each woman tailored her treatment to fit her personal sensibilities; to reassess Mitchell's notorious reputation as a misogynist (gained largely from his 1887 treatment of Charlotte Perkins Gilman); and to develop a more nuanced understanding of the doctor-patient relationship in neurasthenia cases.
- Subjects
NEURASTHENIA; INTELLECTUALS; LIFESTYLES; PATIENTS; PHYSICIANS; NEURASTHENIA in literature
- Publication
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2005, Vol 79, Issue 4, p695
- ISSN
0007-5140
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/bhm.2005.0172