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As the United States rushed toward industrial and technological modernization in the late nineteenth century, people worried that the workplace had become too competitive, the economy too turbulent, domestic chores too taxing, while new machines had created a fast-paced environment that sickened the nation. Physicians testified that, without a doubt, modern civilization was causing a host of ills—everything from irritability to insomnia, lethargy to weight loss, anxiety to lack of ambition, and indigestion to impotence. They called this condition neurasthenia. Neurasthenic Nation investigates how the concept of neurasthenia helped doctors and patients, men and women, and advertisers and consumers negotiate changes commonly associated with “modernity.” Combining a survey of medical and popular literature on neurasthenia with original research into rare archives of personal letters, patient records, and corporate files, David Schuster charts the emergence of a “neurasthenic nation”—a place where people saw their personal health as inextricably tied to the pitfalls and possibilities of a changing world.
This dissertation proposes a metaphor for the years 1869 to 1930 drawn from medicine and unique to the period itself. This metaphor is the disease neurasthenia, a nervous condition affecting the mind and body that was thought to be unique to modern societies. Whereas past studies of neurasthenia have typically relied upon medical articles or literary accounts to understand the disease, this dissertation adds to the analysis patent medicine advertisements, newspapers stories, archived correspondence between physicians and patients, the work of progressive reformers, and archived clinical patient records. By situating neurasthenia at the intersection of private and public life in American society, this dissertation seeks to show how neurasthenia went from being a medical condition defined and diagnosed by professional physicians to being a popularized condition defined and diagnosed by advertisers, journalists, teachers, faith healers, managers, and, importantly, patients themselves. Once popularized, neurasthenia helped create conversations, both public and private, that went beyond narrowly defined medical issues to help people negotiate changes commonly associated with "modernity," including urbanization, the growth of white-collar jobs, professionalization, the rise of the leisure industry, therapeutic religious movements, the commercialization of popular culture, the reevaluation of gender roles, and mass public education. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to define the United States, as it emerged from the nineteenth century, as a "Neurasthenic Nation," a place where people saw their personal health inextricably linked to the pitfalls and possibilities of the changing world around them.
Neurasthenia, meaning nerve weakness, was ‘invented’ in the United States as a disorder of modernity, caused by the fast pace of urban life. Soon after, from the early 1880s onwards, this modern disease crossed the Atlantic. Neurasthenia became much less ‘popular’ in Britain or the Netherlands than in Germany. Neurasthenia’s heyday continued into the first decade of the twentieth century. The label referred to conditions similar to those currently labelled as chronic fatigue syndrome. Why this rise and fall of neurasthenia, and why these differences in popularity This book, which emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch-German conference held in June 2000, explores neurasthenia’s many-sided history from a comparative perspective.
Over fifty million Americans endure a mysterious environmental illness that renders them allergic to chemicals. Innocuous staples from deodorant to garbage bags wreak havoc on sensitives. No one is born with EI; it often starts with a single toxic exposure. Symptoms include extreme fatigue, brain fog, muscle aches, inability to tolerate certain foods. Broudy investigates this disease, and delves into the intricate, ardent subculture that surrounds it--Adapted from jacket
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In 1894, McClure's magazine declared neurasthenia "the national disease of America." In the late-nineteenth century, white neurasthenic men, across classes, shared a collective experience of fatigue and sexual anxiety that threatened their gendered self-perceptions. They learned to identify themselves as neurasthenic from ubiquitous cultural information available in newspapers, advertisements, the YMCA, and lay medical literature. Neurasthenia rhetoric defined manhood in terms of potential, it provided a framework for absolution of past moral failures (such as illicit sex or alcohol use), and it affirmed whiteness as a permanent marker of biological superiority that could not be dismantled at the sign of neurasthenic breakdown. Blending cultural and medical history methods, this project argues neurasthenia rhetoric normalized manly weakness as an unfortunate, yet legitimate experience for the most hardworking and civilized men. In other words, it circumscribed racialized and classed boundaries to include white men, however broken, sexually challenged, or emotionally fraught. Patients and doctors utilized this language in the clinic, and as a result, they legitimized otherwise illicit questions about what it meant to be a healthy, empowered, modern white man in an everchanging modern world.
This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com