Rest cures: The narrative life of a medical practice

"Rest Cures: The Narrative Life of a Medical Practice" examines the substantial role the Rest Cure played in American and British literature and culture from the 1870s through the 1920s. Introduced by the American neurologist and novelist S. Weir Mitchell in 1873, rest cures consisted of diets' high in milk fat and extended periods of enforced bed rest during which time patients were denied most activities while undergoing massage and electrotherapeutics in isolation. By forcing a strictly linear plot upon beleaguered and at times incomprehensible bodies, rest cures were thought to restore equanimity to frazzled minds in equal proportion to the increases in fat and blood they produced; patients' once compromised subjectivity, detectable through individual symptoms, were thought to coalesce into unified subjects: blushing robust bodies. The cure's popularity, as a medical practice and a literary topic, documents the social function that illness, and even more "cure," played in a culture that believed itself in dire need of rest in order to counter the debilitating demands of modern life.; By granting medical history equal footing with literary texts, the dissertation expands our knowledge of medicine's debt to storytelling and of the liberties storytellers take with medical history; and by seeking to understand more fully the relationship between literature and a specific medical treatment, it underscores the problematic nature of literature as evidence in cultural history. The rest cure's narrative life provides, then, literary and cultural critics with a striking example of literature's sway over how medical history is perceived, especially when gender is a central concern. Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Robins, and Virginia Woolf structure the dissertation's examination of medical documents and numerous other literary and popular depictions of the rest cure. These three pivotal feminists experienced the rest cure's influence on the body and sexuality, agency and creativity differently. Their fictionalized responses to the rest cures they underwent not only illuminate the darkest corners of the female imagination under male authority, but also embed the rest cure within key texts in the development of literary and feminist modernism.