NEURASTHENIA, GENDER

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NEURASTHENIA, GENDER AND A CULTURE OF
NERVOUS DEPLETION
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Bath Spa, England
George Cheyne (1671-1743) The English Malady
(1733)
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Neurasthenia (coined 1869)

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

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Some of the shocks of modern civilization
according to nervous disease specialists
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Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894)
MYOGRAPH
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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).
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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)
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Chicago Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
1874 became the Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease in 1876,and the official publication Of
the American Neurological Association
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GEORGE MILLERBEARD (1839-1883)
Portrait upon graduation from Yale College, 1862
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Thomas Edison to George Beard, April 10, 1878,
Courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives Yale
University
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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.

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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 lightthis is the
philosophy of modern nervousness
Beard, American Nervousness (1881) p.99
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Galvanic Treatment of the Central Nervous System
Beard, Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion
(1889) p. 211
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Beards General Faradization
Central Galvanization
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SILAS WEIR MITCHELL (1829-1914)
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• 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

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(No Transcript)
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S. Weir Mitchell examining Civil War
veteran from Gosling, Before Freud
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(No Transcript)
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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
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
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The Yellow WallpaperNew England Magazine, Jan.
1892
I am sitting by the window in this atrocious
nursery
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Manhattan School of Music
Jenny Oakley The Yellow Wallpaper
Stranger Theatre, Toronto The Yellow Wallpaper
Project
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Thomas Wilmer Dewing Lady in White (no. 2), ca.
1910Smithsonian
Henry Ossawa TannerPortrait of the Artist's
Wife, 1897
From, Women on the Verge The Culture of
Neurasthenia in 19th-Century AmericaCantor Arts
Center, Stanford University, 2004-2005
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Thomas Eakins, American Realist Painter
(1844-1916)
Amelia Van Buren, c. 1891
The Artists Wife and his Setter Dog 1884-1886
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Achille-Adrian Proust and Ballet, Lhygiène du
neurasthénique (1897)
Marcel Proust (Adriens Prousts son)
(1871-1922)