Personalizing illness and modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, literary women, and neurasthenia, 1870-1914

This article examines how the affliction of neurasthenia, commonly diagnosed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, acted as a catalyst for intellectual and lifestyle changes during a time of modernization. At the center of the study are three individuals: neurologist S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) and two of his patients, critic and historian Amelia Gere Mason (1831-1923) and writer and homemaker Sarah Butler Wister (1835-1908). Using archived correspondence between Mitchell and his patients, this article seeks to reveal how each woman tailored her treatment to fit her personal sensibilities; to reassess Mitchell's notorious reputation as a misogynist (gained largely from his 1887 treatment of Charlotte Perkins Gilman); and to develop a more nuanced understanding of the doctor-patient relationship in neurasthenia cases.