MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Physician Silas Weir Mitchell is perhaps best remembered for his “Rest Cure” for nervous women, depicted by his onetime patient Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). In the harrowing tale, the narrator slowly goes mad while enduring Mitchell’s regimen of enforced bed rest, seclusion and overfeeding. This oppressive “cure” involved electrotherapy and massage, in addition to a meat-rich diet and weeks or months of bed rest. Historians now view Mitchell’s “Rest Cure” as a striking example of 19th century medical misogyny.
Less well known is Mitchell’s method of treating nervous men. While Mitchell put worried women to bed, he sent anxious men out West to engage in prolonged periods of cattle roping, hunting, roughriding and male bonding. Among the men treated with the so-called “West Cure” were poet Walt Whitman, painter Thomas Eakins, novelist Owen Wister and future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.