What was the resting cure?
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The rest cure was a strictly enforced regime of six to eight weeks of bed rest and isolation, without any creative or intellectual activity or stimulation. It was often accompanied by massage and electrotherapy, as well as a fatty diet, rich in milk and meat.
What was the rest cure in the Yellow Wallpaper?
In addition to narcotics, Mitchell prescribed a rest cure to calm them and limit movement that would keep them from healing. The cure involved four basic elements: bed rest, force-feeding and overfeeding, massage, and electrical stimulation of the muscles.
What were the typical outcomes of rest cures?
The Rest Cure ensured that women remained in their “proper” sphere: the home. Mitchell and his medical peers discouraged female patients from writing, excessive studying or any attempt to enter the professions.
What was the West cure?
Yet it’s a fundamental part of the origins of the modern western and the mythology of the West. The West Cure was a strenuous rest, a mind- and body-toughening escape from the supposedly deleterious effects of civilization.
Can rest cure depression?
Without proper sleep and regeneration, the system will break down—and depressive symptoms appear. And now we know about that converse—that even nasty depressive episodes are treated more effectively if people are taught and trained to effectively sleep—again.
What is the mental illness in the Yellow Wallpaper?
The protagonist of the story might have been suffering from puerperal insanity, a severe form of mental illness labelled in the early 19th century and claimed by doctors to be triggered by the mental and physical strain of giving birth.
Did Charlotte Perkins Gilman experience rest cure?
While she had often been melancholy growing up, motherhood and married life pushed Gilman to the edge. She sought treatment for her “nervous prostration” with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia and in 1887 took the controversial “Rest Cure,” a treatment that included extensive bed rest, that he had pioneered.
How was rest cure treatment developed?
As a remedy, neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, a wealthy and influential Philadelphia neurologist, created the rest cure, a regimen of forced bed rest, restricted diet, and a combination of massage and electrical muscle stimulation in place of exercise.
Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper 1913?
In Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper she says her goal in writing the short story was to prevent other people from going crazy. But what I think she really meant was to keep people from going crazy under oppressive restrictions. She wanted to change this oppressive mindset whether it was in medicine or family roles.
What is the moral of The Yellow Wallpaper?
Because one of the ‘morals’ of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – if ‘moral’ is not too strong a word to use of such a story – is that the husband’s treatment of his wife’s mental illness only succeeds in making her worse, rather than better, until her condition reaches the point where she is completely mad, suffering from …
When did the rest cure become popular?
The rest cure that Mitchell pioneered rose to surprising popularity in the late 1800s, and several physicians adopted and practiced the treatment for decades. Only later did it become a textbook example of the disturbing nonlinearity of American medical progress, the quackery that can live alongside rigorous medical innovation.
What happens at the end of the rest cure?
In it, the female narrator is undergoing the Rest Cure, isolated in a old nursery with bars on the windows and faded yellow wallpaper. Her forced isolation and restricted intellectual life gradually deteriorates her mind. At the end of the story, she tears off pieces of the wallpaper, trying to free the woman who she sees trapped inside.
What is the rest cure for Elizabeth Mitchell?
Mitchell’s rest cure consisted of bed rest, isolation, overfeeding, and massage/electricity on her muscles. When Gilman realized that Mitchell’s treatment worsened her depression, she left both her husband and doctor.
What is the rest cure in the Yellow Wallpaper?
Mitchell’s rest cure consisted of bed rest, isolation, overfeeding, and massage/electricity on her muscles. When Gilman realized that Mitchell’s treatment worsened her depression, she left both her husband and doctor. Several years later, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a reaction to her physician Mitchell’s prescribed rest cure.