President Theodore Roosevelt.Īlthough the Rest and West cures involved wildly different therapeutic strategies, both were designed to treat the same medical condition: neurasthenia. Among the men treated with the so-called “West Cure” were poet Walt Whitman, painter Thomas Eakins, novelist Owen Wister and future U.S. 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. Less well known is Mitchell’s method of treating nervous men. Historians now view Mitchell’s “Rest Cure” as a striking example of 19thcentury medical misogyny.
This oppressive “cure” involved electrotherapy and massage, in addition to a meat-rich diet and weeks or months of bed rest. In the harrowing tale, the narrator slowly goes mad while enduring Mitchell’s regimen of enforced bed rest, seclusion and overfeeding. 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).
