In the 1870s, American doctor Silas Weir Mitchell came up with a new cure for a condition known as neurasthenia. This was a catch-all term for a range of mental and “nervous” symptoms, including fatigue, depression, anxiety, insomnia, migraines and “hysteria”.
Mitchell’s cure was gender dependent. His male patients were sent into the countryside for long stretches of vigorous exercise. Often, they were literally sent west, where they spent time horse riding, cattle roping, hunting and bonding with other men in the open air. Famous recipients of this cure included the poet Walt Whitman and future president Theodore Roosevelt.
Mitchell wrote that men with neurasthenia could benefit from “a sturdy contest with Nature”. Nervous illness, he claimed, was feminising and therefore detrimental to men, making a strong man “like the average woman”.
The cure for “nervous” women could not have been more different: total and complete rest. The “rest cure” involved a strict regimen of months of enforced bed rest, seclusion and a fatty, meat-based diet. The writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman described her experience of the cure in her 1892 story in which she documents in harrowing detail her worsening mental health and the hallucinations
