the.com/rest cure
A harsh Victorian treatment that isolated women labeled 'hysterical,' often worsening their suffering instead of healing it.
means A medically prescribed regimen of total bed rest, isolation, forced feeding, and sensory deprivation (no reading, writing, or visitors), once given mainly to women diagnosed with 'nervous' ailments.
from The treatment was codified by American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell in the late 1800s, who developed it partly from his experience treating soldiers' nerve injuries after the Civil War and then applied it to women diagnosed with neurasthenia and hysteria. It became notorious largely through Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' written after Gilman endured Mitchell's own rest cure and nearly lost her mind from the enforced idleness — the fiction turned into the era's sharpest critique of the very cure it depicted.
- invented by
- Silas Weir Mitchell, 1873, for nervous exhaustion
- protocol
- weeks of bed rest, isolation, forced overfeeding
- banned activities
- reading, writing, and talking, especially for women
- literary revenge
- inspired The Yellow Wallpaper, its fiercest takedown