S. Weir Mitchell's work on the etiology and treatment of neurasthenia, commonly called "brain drain," provided the intersection of medical diagnoses of a serious ailment with cultural critiques of modernity and the vigorous reassertion of traditional gender ideologies. It was for neurasthenia that Mitchell treated feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman and countless others, for whom the pace and pressures of modern society had proved too difficult to bear, and who were exhibiting symptoms ranging from severe depression and unbearable lassitude, to anxiety and panic disorders. First published in...

This volume presents one of Mitchell's touchstone texts of neurasthenia--cultural critique as medical diagnosis. Fat and Blood was a best seller in its time and went through multiple printings and numerous editions. It fused the cultural critique of modern society and the inversion of gender roles with the medical analysis of this strange new ailment. Today we are likely to read it angrily, as it serves to enforce the most pernicious stereotypes abut women (and not so incidentally, about men)--stereotypes that have proved resilient obstacles to women's advancement. But Fat and Blood supports...

Silas Weir was a 19th century American physician and writer. He became a specialist in neurology after serving in the Civil War in charge of nervous injuries and maladies at Turners Lane Hospital, Philadelphia. Weir writes of curing neural conditions by a rest cure consisting of isolation, confinement to bed, dieting and massage. Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria was written in 1877. Weir states "The cases thus treated have been chiefly women of a class well known to every physician,--nervous women, who, as a rule, are thin and lack blood....