The popularity of treating symptoms like mental and emotional fatigue as neurasthenia ran from 1870 to 1910.
A large number of celebrities in literature, the arts, politics, and business were labeled as being neurasthenic, a diagnosis they accepted for themselves.
Theodore Roosevelt went out West to deal with his neurasthenia, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, to challenge the male physicians' ways of dealing with neurasthenia as she experienced it.
By 1920, the Freudian approach, which was much more complex in explaining symptoms of fatigue, began to supplant the simple one-disease theory of neurasthenia. Satires against quack doctors who treated patients suffering from persistent fatique and other nervous disorders were written during the heyday of neurasthenic rest cures. S. Weir Mitchell's The Autobiography of a Quack, (1900) is one such example. In 1910, O'Henry wrote a satire called Let Me Take Your Pulse: Adventures in Neurasthenia.
More recently, a historical novel on the subject was written by T.C. Boyle called The Road to Wellville (1994).
The appearance of a condition labeled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) in the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s has brought a renewed interest in the the term neurasthenia. In JAMA, April 27, 1994 appeared an article, "Was Neurasthenia a Legitimate Morbid entity":
During its heyday, which lasted from the 1870s to the turn of the century, the diagnosis of neurasthenia provided patients with a scientifically legitimate explanation of their inability to perform their expected roles. Furthermore, the patients, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s and from the urban middle classes, recovered.
Today, many people feel, like Beard's patients that they are living on a plane lower than normal. Symptom clusters that include fatigue and a general lack of vitality continue to command considerable medical attention. One has only to consult current medical journal articles on chronic fatique syndrome to see that symptom puzzles that engaged our recent ancestors continue to intrigue us.
Neurasthenia does live on, however, as a popular diagnostic entity in China, where its discourse of nerves and energy flows is believed to be more compatible with traditional Chinese explanations of fatigue and malaise than with the more purely psychological explanation[s] from the post-Freudian West.
A large number of celebrities in literature, the arts, politics, and business were labeled as being neurasthenic, a diagnosis they accepted for themselves.
Theodore Roosevelt went out West to deal with his neurasthenia, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, to challenge the male physicians' ways of dealing with neurasthenia as she experienced it.
By 1920, the Freudian approach, which was much more complex in explaining symptoms of fatigue, began to supplant the simple one-disease theory of neurasthenia. Satires against quack doctors who treated patients suffering from persistent fatique and other nervous disorders were written during the heyday of neurasthenic rest cures. S. Weir Mitchell's The Autobiography of a Quack, (1900) is one such example. In 1910, O'Henry wrote a satire called Let Me Take Your Pulse: Adventures in Neurasthenia.
More recently, a historical novel on the subject was written by T.C. Boyle called The Road to Wellville (1994).
The appearance of a condition labeled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) in the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s has brought a renewed interest in the the term neurasthenia. In JAMA, April 27, 1994 appeared an article, "Was Neurasthenia a Legitimate Morbid entity":
During its heyday, which lasted from the 1870s to the turn of the century, the diagnosis of neurasthenia provided patients with a scientifically legitimate explanation of their inability to perform their expected roles. Furthermore, the patients, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s and from the urban middle classes, recovered.
Today, many people feel, like Beard's patients that they are living on a plane lower than normal. Symptom clusters that include fatigue and a general lack of vitality continue to command considerable medical attention. One has only to consult current medical journal articles on chronic fatique syndrome to see that symptom puzzles that engaged our recent ancestors continue to intrigue us.
Neurasthenia does live on, however, as a popular diagnostic entity in China, where its discourse of nerves and energy flows is believed to be more compatible with traditional Chinese explanations of fatigue and malaise than with the more purely psychological explanation[s] from the post-Freudian West.
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