Wild Unrest by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz;

Author:Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mitchell was using the word convulsion initially in its technical sense, as a muscular contraction, although as he spoke of “hysterical convulsion” he suggested something of Charcot’s sway.

Mitchell’s larger body of writing makes it clear that as he dealt with women experiencing emotional outbursts, sometimes designated hysterical subjects, his responses to them varied. He alternated between somatic determinism, sympathetic understanding of suffering patients, and moral condemnation.

Believing that much female debility lay in the body, Mitchell saw his first task as somatic therapy. When he faced a distressed patient, such as Mrs. B., who was either in danger of developing hysterical symptoms or just beginning to have them, his goal was to arrest the decline, build up the patient, and keep the incipient symptoms from becoming habits that, if repeated, would create organic damage and become fixed. His language in describing the case of Mrs. B. was morally neutral, and it could be in other instances. On occasion, however, Mitchell gave vent to feelings of moral outrage, shedding, as did many other physicians who treated women’s nervous complaints, his tone of medical neutrality. In Fat and Blood, for example, he stated that that the hysterical woman suffered from a form of “moral degradation.” She was selfish and had lost “the healthy mastery which every human being should retain over her own emotions and wants.”37

One description stands out. As Mitchell made an argument for the need to remove a sufferer from her family, he wrote how she destroyed those around her.

By slow but sure degrees the healthy life is absorbed by the sick life. . . . The patient has pain, a tender spine, for example; she is urged to give it rest. She cannot read; the self-constituted nurse reads to her. At last light hurts her eyes; the mother remains shut up with her all day in a darkened room. A draught of air is supposed to do harm, and the doors and windows are closed, and the ingenuity of kindness is taxed to imagine new sources of like trouble, until at last the window-cracks are stuffed with cotton, the chimney stopped, and even the keyhole guarded. It is easy to see where this all leads to,—the nurse falls ill, and a new victim is found. I have seen a hysterical, anaemic girl kill in this way three generations of nurses.38

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