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NEURASTHENIA, GENDER AND A CULTURE OF NERVOUS DEPLETION

NEURASTHENIA, GENDER AND A CULTURE OF NERVOUS DEPLETION. George Cheyne (1671-1743) The English Malady (1733). Bath Spa, England. “Neurasthenia” (coined 1869). Neuro— nerve Asthenia—weakness On analogy from anemia (lack of blood/iron). Some of the shocks of modern civilization

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NEURASTHENIA, GENDER AND A CULTURE OF NERVOUS DEPLETION

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  1. NEURASTHENIA, GENDER AND A CULTURE OF NERVOUS DEPLETION

  2. George Cheyne (1671-1743) The English Malady (1733) Bath Spa, England

  3. “Neurasthenia” (coined 1869) • Neuro— nerve • Asthenia—weakness • On analogy from anemia (lack of blood/iron)

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

  5. Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894) MYOGRAPH

  6. “…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).

  7. 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)

  8. 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

  9. GEORGE MILLERBEARD (1839-1883) Portrait upon graduation from Yale College, 1862

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

  11. 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.

  12. “…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

  13. Galvanic Treatment of the Central Nervous System Beard, Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (1889) p. 211

  14. Beard’s General Faradization Central Galvanization

  15. SILAS WEIR MITCHELL (1829-1914)

  16. 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

  17. S. Weir Mitchell examining Civil War veteran from Gosling, Before Freud

  18. “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

  19. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

  20. “The Yellow Wallpaper”New England Magazine, Jan. 1892 “I am sitting by the window in this atrocious nursery”

  21. Manhattan School of Music Jenny Oakley “The Yellow Wallpaper” Stranger Theatre, Toronto The Yellow Wallpaper Project

  22. 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

  23. Thomas Eakins, American Realist Painter (1844-1916) Amelia Van Buren, c. 1891 The Artist’s Wife and his Setter Dog 1884-1886

  24. Achille-Adrian Proust and Ballet, L’hygiène du neurasthénique (1897) Marcel Proust (Adrien’s Proust’s son) (1871-1922)

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