Essay: No Rest - by Alicia Puglionesi

Sly Saint · Aug 17, 2020

Interesting essay 4,900 words long.

In 1877, the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia published a therapeutic guidebook called Fat and Blood. In its pages, he laid out a comprehensive treatment programme for patients of a class well known to every physician, – nervous women, who, as a rule, are thin, and lack blood. Most of them have … passed through many hands and been treated in turn for gastric, spinal, or uterine troubles, but who remained at the end as at the beginning, invalids.

Mitchell was not alone in his disdain for these patients, whose illness had no cause detectable with the tools of the era. To him, they represented a particular kind of moral menace, a refusal to perform one’s gendered duties, which could infect all of society. With unselfconsciously hysterical rhetoric, Mitchell stoked fear that the United States’ disciplined, masculine-bodied economy would be engulfed by hysteria. The menace had to be contained.

The treatment he described, the rest cure, was correspondingly extreme. Patients were confined to bed for at least six weeks, at first not allowed to read, visit the bathroom or even roll over unaided. They consumed heroic amounts of milk, about two quarts a day, gradually supplemented with as much food as the patient could eat (and probably more: Mitchell advised that complaints of over-fullness be disregarded). Finally, they began strengthening exercises and were gradually allowed to walk. ‘A large number of women,’ he claimed, ‘have been rescued by my treatment after all else had failed, and … have ever since enjoyed the most absolute and useful vigour of mind and body.’
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I am spending a day in bed. While I ‘rest’, everything I should be writing curls out my ears like smoke. At this stage, I am probably collapsed on a sagging futon in my boyfriend’s house. We have a discussion about what will happen if I remain unable to cook or clean for myself. A growing list of small tasks that I’m pathetically incapable of completing scrolls on the backs of my eyelids. I want to work, not just because there’s no such thing as sick leave for adjunct professors, but because I will go crazy if I can’t engage in some kind of meaningful interface with the outside world. I have lost traction, like a broken water-wheel, with time, the only real resource I have, gushing past.
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‘I don’t see anything wrong,’ says the neurologist, while rushing to escape the room. ‘I think this is chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s when people are very tired. They get exercise therapy and see a psychiatrist,’ he explains as he shuts the door. I recognise from context cues that the practitioner has cloaked his verdict of hysteria in a neutral clinical term.
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full essay here
https://aeon.co/essays/the-rest-cur...king-body?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss-feed

Tia · Aug 17, 2020

Sly Saint said: ↑

Interesting essay 4,900 words long.

full essay here
https://aeon.co/essays/the-rest-cur...king-body?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss-feed
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll give this a read. I like the metaphor of the broken water wheel.

Hell..hath..no..fury... · Aug 17, 2020

Thanks @Sly Saint that looks interesting!

the term ‘moral menace’ was particularly amusing

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Essay: No Rest - by Alicia Puglionesi

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Essay: No Rest - by Alicia Puglionesi

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