- The topic is Neurasthenia, a disease that affected industrial America during a time of social movements.
- George Miller Beard, an early neurologist, described Neurasthenia as a neurological disease caused by stress.
- Neurasthenia was not a specific disease, but rather a broad category that included various conditions like depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, and autism.
- Silas Weir Mitchell, building on Beard's ideas, developed gender-specific cures for Neurasthenia - the West cure for men and the rest cure for women.
- The rest cure involved bed rest for weeks or months and was primarily prescribed to middle-upper class and upper-class women.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a famous feminist and social reformer, was a patient of Mitchell and suffered psychological damage from the rest cure.
- Neurasthenia affected the leadership of social movements, as many upper-class women involved in these movements were diagnosed with the disease.
- While Neurasthenia did not completely stop the social movements, it significantly slowed them down as key leaders were impacted.
- The husbands of these women often hired Mitchell to diagnose and treat them, possibly to remove them from the movements.
- Neurasthenia had a lasting impact, as seen in Gilman's famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" which served as a warning about the rest cure.

- Silas Weir Mitchell was contacted to diagnose women with neurasthenia for political reasons 
- The "rest cure" and "West cure" impacted society's view of men and women 
- Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Rider persona was influenced by undergoing the West cure 
- Medicine and politics should not mix, as seen in the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic 
- The West cure was more beneficial because it allowed individuals to go on vacation and rejuvenate 
- The rest cure, on the other hand, forced individuals to lay down in a room they disliked 
- This circular motion and lack of change negatively impacted individuals 
- The pandemic also forced people into a rest cure-like situation 
- The video is based on research presented at a conference and more videos on similar topics are desired.

This video is about a disease from the 19th century called Neurasthenia. This was a presentation that I did at a research conference, and I felt like y'all would enjoy this. I may do more videos like this in the future if it does well.

Hello everybody and welcome back to lesser known history today I am going to be doing a video over a topic that I was able to present at a research conference that I was a part of and this is some of the Historical research that I did and I just thought you all might appreciate this.

So without further ado, let's hop into it.

So today's topic is Neurasthenia, how a disease stopped a movement.

We'll hop into Neurasthenia in just 1 second, but beforehand it is important that we talk about industrial America.

So industrial America was very crowded, there were new ideas that were being thrown out there all the time, there was a lot of social movement going on as people moved from rural communities to urban cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, new ideas were being spread and 2 important movements really started to gain traction, the temperance movement and the women's suffrage movement.

And there was a lot of anxiety In these cities as these new ideas are being spread around and the status quo was being challenged Enter a man by

He was born in Connecticut in 1839 to a very religious family and he was part of the early neurologists, So mind you this is back when science was a mixture of verifiable evidence and then quack medicine.

For those of you that don't know what quack medicine is, that is just like medicine that doesn't work.

A great example would be a lot of times there are people that would shock you to try and cure you of depression which as we all know that does not work but that's just an example of what medicine at the time was so neurology at this point in time was a mixture of those 2 things so some of the things that they did in neurology made sense, some of it didn't.

So he was a big reformer of medical education, he wanted to make medical education more accessible to everybody.

He saw changes in the ways of American life, particularly with people going into the city and working.

But they were working long hours and he would see that they would grow more and more tired.

They may be more melancholic, as he would write.

And so he thinks that something is affecting people.

So he describes a new neurological disease.

He ends up dying young, and that will be important later on.

to talk about this new neurological disease.

So the disease that George Miller Beer describes, He dubs Neurasthenia.

Now this is not the first time Neurasthenia has even been written about.

There's actually another neurologist who talks about Neurasthenia and publishes it in

a paper about 4 months prior, but George Miller Beard gets all the credit for its discovery because it was based off of his ideas about the disease and his observations that most of the later studies were based off of.

Neurasthenia is the disease of the central nervous system or CNS So that would

be your nerves in your arms your legs your spine most importantly for this study is Your brain right your brain is the center of your nervous system So he says that the reason people are getting neurasthenia is because of an overload of stress

and everybody's stressed out so this new disease is forming and so here are some of these symptoms that he provides irritable moods being deeply melancholic, you could have claustrophobia, agoraphobia, or anthropophobia.

Now you may notice that these last 3 things are all phobias, they're all separate entities on their own, and that should give you a clue to the fact that neurasthenia is a disease is completely incorrect.

Neurasthenia today you could have or it's been broken apart into many different parts So let's say that you were to be diagnosed today with depression Back then in the mid 1800s early 1900s.

You could be diagnosed at neurasthenia Here's some other diseases that fall into that category Anxiety disorder you could be schizophrenic You could have autism all those different things fall under the wide scope of Neurasthenia And the list of symptoms for Neurasthenia could literally go on for pages and pages and pages So, Again, neurasthenia is like a junk taxon in science.

For those that don't know, a junk taxon is when you take a bunch of animals that seem related, put it all together, and then you say that is, like, they're all related.

So he builds off of George Miller Beard's ideas when George Miller Beard Dies and he decides to create cures based on gender He creates 1 called the West cure

and it's he said that this is able to cure a man's innate manly urges so literally what this cure is is if you're a man suffering from neurasthenia Silas Weir Mitchell will write you a prescription and you will go out to Montana or Wyoming or in

the western United States and work on a ranch for a couple of months.

And then you'll come back and you'll feel great.

And then for women, he says they need a rest cure.

Well rest cures are bed rest just totally blown out of proportion.

He said he did this because in his mind that women were more delicate and that's what he says.

Which of course is not true, but that's just the writings of a man in

Mitchell and some other neurologist, and you were forced to lay in bed for weeks or months on end with little to no talking and little to no mental exertion you maybe got to walk around for an hour a day if you were lucky

This is prescribed primarily to middle upper class and upper class women

Well This is not because it neurasthenia primarily impacted these people Neurasthenia as a disease probably impacted everybody across the United States for a reason I'll talk about in

a little bit But it was only middle upper class

and upper class women who could afford his services

so social reformers Were the main flower being called up why well most middle upper class and upper class women were social reformers during the progressive era in the United States.

They were the only women that could afford to go out and not have to work and to

go and protest and work behind these social movements.

So this led to many of them being diagnosed with this disease.

We'll talk about why that's important in just 1 moment, but the person that you're seeing right here, that is Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

So Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a very famous feminist and social reformer of the progressive era.

She is prescribed the rest cure And over the next couple of months, her life becomes absolutely miserable.

So much so that she suffers psychological damage that takes over a decade to recover from.

She ends up divorcing her husband at the time, becomes estranged with her daughter for

Now eventually she remarries, comes closer with her daughter again and everything's okay.

But she writes this short story called The Yellow Wallpaper, which is today a quintessential and famous short story of gothic horror.

And in this story a woman is forced to lay in her bed in her bedroom

and look at her yellow wallpaper as she's suffering from neurasthenia and she's undergoing a rest cure but as time goes on she grows crazier and crazier and by the end of the story she's totally destroyed And so this was meant as a warning to anybody who wanted to

take a rest here Perkins Gilman even sends this story to Silas Weir Mitchell now He never responds, but

The reason I bring up Charlotte Perkins Gilman is because she's the perfect example

of a social reformer who is in a great position to help out movements that she believed in that was diagnosed with the disease and therefore took her out of that process.

these movements ended up succeeding, although temperance lasted for about 10 years, but they both succeeded.

So was Neurasthenia able to totally stop the movements?

But here's what's important during the middle of the early to middle beginnings of these movements

in the we're talking 1880s 1890s maybe early 1910s and they're starting to pick up steam they're slowed down a lot because so many of the leadership of these different organizations are being diagnosed with neurasthenia.

It affects upper-middle-class and upper-class women because they are the only people that can afford to

But they're also the only people whose husbands are able to hire Silas Weir Mitchell, and many of these husbands didn't like that these women were being involved in social movements.

And so now sometimes Silas Weir Mitchell could have been contacted simply because they wanted to figure out why this woman was feeling so bad But there are some times when Silas Weir Mitchell was contacted by a high-ranking political official to go examine his wife with the political official in the back of his mind understanding that if she was diagnosed with neurasthenia she would either be taken out of the picture temporarily or she would end up moving on after it was done.

So this helped to prolong these movements because of all the upper class women who were being knocked out.

If a leader was taken out for several months and then another 1 was taken out, and another 1 was taken out, it was very difficult to be able to plan things out.

So it also impacted how society views men and women.

The modern day American view of the American West also was heavily influenced by this.

The most famous person to ever undergo a West cure was Teddy Roosevelt and so part of his Rough Rider manly man persona is because he underwent a West cure and it was idolized And here is a picture called a reading of 2 women who are suffering from neurasthenia.

And notice how they're portrayed in a very passive way, now the room is very dampened down.

Well that's because of the perception of women that was put out there by neurasthenia.

And this is a perfect example of why medicine and politics should not mix.

Now, we have unfortunately lived in a time where medicine has been heavily politicized.

Whether or not you prescribe to different belief systems, it is very well known that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on a very political tone, very sadly.

And so this is not the first time this has happened, not even remotely, We've had multiple times where politics and medicine get involved and this is a perfect example of another time When medicine and politics were intertwined and it only ended up hurting people The rest cure never helped somebody but a West cure did so why?

Well, it's very simple If you were given a West cure you were sent on a vacation You left the busy cities and you returned to the rural area where you were able to breathe fresh air and hear the sounds of nature.

Whereas in a rest cure, you're forced to lay down.

For many people, this in a room that they hate.

And so as this time goes on and your scenery never changes and you're stuck in this rut and this circular motion, it really starts to hit you hard.

We've all experienced this during the beginnings of the pandemic when we were all forced to sit inside many times in the same apartment or home and not see anybody except for these computer screens in front of us.

We suffered an example of a rest cure and we didn't even realize it yet.

I hope you guys all enjoyed this different type of video.

Again this was inspired by the lecture that I gave at a research conference.

This is the research I did and I was able to present it.

So I hope you guys all enjoyed and if you guys would like more videos like this of research that I'm able to conduct on my own, please let me know.

I hope this was a really interesting rabbit hole

There are so many of these in history and I really want to cover more things like this.

So if you enjoyed, hit that like button and subscribe and I will see


Speaker 0: Hello everybody and welcome back to lesser known history today I am going to be doing a video over a topic that I was able to present at a research conference that I was a part of and this is some of the Historical research that I did and I just thought you all might appreciate this. So without further ado, let's hop into it. So today's topic is Neurasthenia, how a disease stopped a movement. So what is Neurasthenia? We'll hop into Neurasthenia in just 1 second, but beforehand it is important that we talk about industrial America.

So industrial America was very crowded, there were new ideas that were being thrown out there all the time, there was a lot of social movement going on as people moved from rural communities to urban cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, new ideas were being spread and 2 important movements really started to gain traction, the temperance movement and the women's suffrage movement. And there was a lot of anxiety In these cities as these new ideas are being spread around and the status quo was being challenged Enter a man by

Speaker 1: the name of George Miller Beard.

Speaker 0: He was born in Connecticut in 1839 to a very religious family and he was part of the early neurologists, So mind you this is back when science was a mixture of verifiable evidence and then quack medicine. For those of you that don't know what quack medicine is, that is just like medicine that doesn't work. A great example would be a lot of times there are people that would shock you to try and cure you of depression which as we all know that does not work but that's just an example of what medicine at the time was so neurology at this point in time was a mixture of those 2 things so some of the things that they did in neurology made sense, some of it didn't. So he was a big reformer of medical education, he wanted to make medical education more accessible to everybody. He saw changes in the ways of American life, particularly with people going into the city and working.

But they were working long hours and he would see that they would grow more and more tired. They may be more melancholic, as he would write. And so he thinks that something is affecting people. So he describes a new neurological disease. He ends up dying young, and that will be important later on.

But we're going

Speaker 1: to talk about this new neurological disease. So the disease that George Miller Beer describes, He dubs Neurasthenia. Now this is not the first time Neurasthenia has even been written about. There's actually another neurologist who talks about Neurasthenia and publishes it in

Speaker 0: a paper about 4 months prior, but George Miller Beard gets all the credit for its discovery because it was based off of his ideas about the disease and his observations that most of the later studies were based off of. So what is neurasthenia? Neurasthenia is the disease of the central nervous system or CNS So that would

Speaker 1: be your nerves in your arms your legs your spine most importantly for this study is Your brain right your brain is the center of your nervous system So he says that the reason people are getting neurasthenia is because of an overload of stress

Speaker 0: and everybody's stressed out so this new disease is forming and so here are some of these symptoms that he provides irritable moods being deeply melancholic, you could have claustrophobia, agoraphobia, or anthropophobia. Now you may notice that these last 3 things are all phobias, they're all separate entities on their own, and that should give you a clue to the fact that neurasthenia is a disease is completely incorrect. Neurasthenia today you could have or it's been broken apart into many different parts So let's say that you were to be diagnosed today with depression Back then in the mid 1800s early 1900s. You could be diagnosed at neurasthenia Here's some other diseases that fall into that category Anxiety disorder you could be schizophrenic You could have autism all those different things fall under the wide scope of Neurasthenia And the list of symptoms for Neurasthenia could literally go on for pages and pages and pages So, Again, neurasthenia is like a junk taxon in science. For those that don't know, a junk taxon is when you take a bunch of animals that seem related, put it all together, and then you say that is, like, they're all related.

That's what happens with neurasthenia.

Speaker 1: So this is Silas Weir Mitchell. So he builds off of George Miller Beard's ideas when George Miller Beard Dies and he decides to create cures based on gender He creates 1 called the West cure

Speaker 0: and this is for men

Speaker 1: and it's he said that this is able to cure a man's innate manly urges so literally what this cure is is if you're a man suffering from neurasthenia Silas Weir Mitchell will write you a prescription and you will go out to Montana or Wyoming or in

Speaker 0: the western United States and work on a ranch for a couple of months. And then you'll come back and you'll feel great. And then for women, he says they need a rest cure. So we all know what bed rest is. Well rest cures are bed rest just totally blown out of proportion.

He said he did this because in his mind that women were more delicate and that's what he says. Which of course is not true, but that's just the writings of a man in

Speaker 1: the 1880s. So what is the rest cure? So you

Speaker 0: had to be diagnosed by Silas R. Mitchell and some other neurologist, and you were forced to lay in bed for weeks or months on end with little to no talking and little to no mental exertion you maybe got to walk around for an hour a day if you were lucky

Speaker 1: This is prescribed primarily to middle upper class and upper class women

Speaker 0: Why? Well This is not because it neurasthenia primarily impacted these people Neurasthenia as a disease probably impacted everybody across the United States for a reason I'll talk about in

Speaker 1: a little bit But it was only middle upper class

Speaker 0: and upper class women who could afford his services

Speaker 1: so social reformers Were the main flower being called up why well most middle upper class and upper class women were social reformers during the progressive era in the United States. They were the only women that could afford to go out and not have to work and to

Speaker 0: go and protest and work behind these social movements.

Speaker 1: So this led to many of them being diagnosed with this disease. We'll talk about why that's important in just 1 moment, but the person that you're seeing right here, that is Charlotte Perkins Gilman. So Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a very famous feminist and social reformer of the progressive era. She advocated for women's suffrage

Speaker 0: and so she was a patient of Mitchell. She is prescribed the rest cure And over the next couple of months, her life becomes absolutely miserable. So much so that she suffers psychological damage that takes over a decade to recover from. She ends up divorcing her husband at the time, becomes estranged with her daughter for

Speaker 1: a little bit. Now eventually she remarries, comes closer with her daughter again and everything's okay. But she writes this short story called The Yellow Wallpaper, which is today a quintessential and famous short story of gothic horror. And in this story a woman is forced to lay in her bed in her bedroom

Speaker 0: and look at her yellow wallpaper as she's suffering from neurasthenia and she's undergoing a rest cure but as time goes on she grows crazier and crazier and by the end of the story she's totally destroyed And so this was meant as a warning to anybody who wanted to

Speaker 1: take a rest here Perkins Gilman even sends this story to Silas Weir Mitchell now He never responds, but

Speaker 0: that is a cool thing that she does. So let's talk about the impact. So let's talk about the impact. The reason I bring up Charlotte Perkins Gilman is because she's the perfect example

Speaker 1: of a social reformer who is in a great position to help out movements that she believed in that was diagnosed with the disease and therefore took her out of that process. Now we all know that both of

Speaker 0: these movements ended up succeeding, although temperance lasted for about 10 years, but they both succeeded. So was Neurasthenia able to totally stop the movements? No.

Speaker 1: But here's what's important during the middle of the early to middle beginnings of these movements

Speaker 0: in the we're talking 1880s 1890s maybe early 1910s and they're starting to pick up steam they're slowed down a lot because so many of the leadership of these different organizations are being diagnosed with neurasthenia. So why does this happen? Well, we talked about it earlier. It affects upper-middle-class and upper-class women because they are the only people that can afford to

Speaker 1: be a part of these social movements. But they're also the only people whose husbands are able to hire Silas Weir Mitchell, and many of these husbands didn't like that these women were being involved in social movements.

Speaker 0: And so now sometimes Silas Weir Mitchell could have been contacted simply because they wanted to figure out why this woman was feeling so bad But there are some times when Silas Weir Mitchell was contacted by a high-ranking political official to go examine his wife with the political official in the back of his mind understanding that if she was diagnosed with neurasthenia she would either be taken out of the picture temporarily or she would end up moving on after it was done. So this helped to prolong these movements because of all the upper class women who were being knocked out. If a leader was taken out for several months and then another 1 was taken out, and another 1 was taken out, it was very difficult to be able to plan things out. So it also impacted how society views men and women. The modern day American view of the American West also was heavily influenced by this.

The West cure. The most famous person to ever undergo a West cure was Teddy Roosevelt and so part of his Rough Rider manly man persona is because he underwent a West cure and it was idolized And here is a picture called a reading of 2 women who are suffering from neurasthenia. And notice how they're portrayed in a very passive way, now the room is very dampened down. Well that's because of the perception of women that was put out there by neurasthenia. And this is a perfect example of why medicine and politics should not mix.

Now, we have unfortunately lived in a time where medicine has been heavily politicized. Whether or not you prescribe to different belief systems, it is very well known that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on a very political tone, very sadly. And so this is not the first time this has happened, not even remotely, We've had multiple times where politics and medicine get involved and this is a perfect example of another time When medicine and politics were intertwined and it only ended up hurting people The rest cure never helped somebody but a West cure did so why? Well, it's very simple If you were given a West cure you were sent on a vacation You left the busy cities and you returned to the rural area where you were able to breathe fresh air and hear the sounds of nature. You were able to be rejuvenated.

Whereas in a rest cure, you're forced to lay down. For many people, this in a room that they hate. And so as this time goes on and your scenery never changes and you're stuck in this rut and this circular motion, it really starts to hit you hard. We've all experienced this during the beginnings of the pandemic when we were all forced to sit inside many times in the same apartment or home and not see anybody except for these computer screens in front of us. We suffered an example of a rest cure and we didn't even realize it yet.

I hope you guys all enjoyed this different type of video. Again this was inspired by the lecture that I gave at a research conference. This is the research I did and I was able to present it. So I hope you guys all enjoyed and if you guys would like more videos like this of research that I'm able to conduct on my own, please let me know. I'm more than happy to do this And

Speaker 1: I hope this was a really interesting rabbit hole

Speaker 0: to go down. There are so many of these in history and I really want to cover more things like this. So if you enjoyed, hit that like button and subscribe and I will see

See all Lesser Known History transcripts on Youtube

Neurasthenia: How a Disease Stopped a Movement