“Our one great national malady”: Neurasthenia and American Imperial and Masculine Anxiety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (2021)
White upper middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century were entrenched in a battle with a newly discovered, or invented, mental illness called neurasthenia. This essay examines the ways in which the medical discourse of neurasthenia reflected late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white Anglo-Saxon men’s belief in, as well as anxiety over, American values bolstered by their idea of cultural, racial, and sexual superiority and consolidated through a conjunction of medicine and politics. The idea of neurasthenia as white American men’s malady functioned as a mark both of whites’ racial superiority to the “new” immigrants and African Americans as well as of women’s intellectual inferiority to the opposite sex of their own race. Imposing a subtle distortion on the etiology and diagnosis of neurasthenia and associating it with specific groups of people, the “American disease” constituted the era’s representative pathological symptoms which addressed Anglo-Saxon American men’s anxieties about overcivilized effeminacy and racial and national decadence which was originated as a response to the racial and sexual heterogeneity. This essay also argues that neurasthenia was an imagined disease which addressed late nineteenth-century American men’s spatial anxiety about the decline of the American pastoral ideal caused by the closure of the frontier. Given that the treatment for neurasthenic men was an escape to the frontier in the West in which they could rejuvenate withered American masculinity, their uneasiness about barbarous, unhygienic, and prolific immigrants and unruly white women, in fact, was tied to their spatial anxiety which symptomatically signifies the crisis of American masculinity. Channeled through the medical knowledge of neurology, it made American men’s racial, sexual, and spatial anxieties function to act out their racist, misogynist, nativist, and imperialist impulses which legitimized exclusionary political techniques toward the racial and sexual others such as the U.S. imperial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s and a eugenic-influenced immigration policy from the 1900s through the1920s. In this sense, the decline of neurasthenia around 1920 should not be attributed solely to the continued efforts to professionalize American medicine accompanied by recent discoveries of chemical factors such as hormones and vitamins and the rise of psychiatry and psychology which offered physicians with a more specific theory of health built on clinical laboratory science. Like its rise, the decision to move away from the neurasthenic diagnosis was rather a cultural phenomenon, which reflected the American ascendancy to global power in the early twentieth century, particularly after the First World War. Sustaining a political order rested on racial and sexual hierarchies both within and outside the American continent, American men felt that they were no longer liable to specific, time-tested anxiety and somatic symptoms of neurasthenia, which was more an ideological and cultural construct than a clinical entity that dramatizes the racial, sexual, and imperial politics of the-turn-of-the-twentieth-century America.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Anderson, Warwick;
(2006)
Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Phillipines
Article
Tanfer Emin Tunc;
(2022)
The Autobiography of a Neurasthene (1910): The Medical Counternarratives of Margaret Abigail Cleaves, MD
Book
Gerald R. Gems;
(2024)
Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport
Book
Hickman, Timothy Alton;
(2007)
The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870--1920
Article
Rachel Elder;
(2022)
White Suits and Kangaroo Kills: Making Men's Careers in American Nursing
Article
Slijkhuis, Jessica;
Oosterhuis, Harry;
(2013)
“Paralysed with fears and worries”: Neurasthenia as a Gender-Specific Disease of Civilization
Article
Segrest, Mab;
(2014)
Exalted on the Ward: “Mary Roberts,” the Georgia State Sanitarium, and the Psychiatric “Speciality” of Race
Book
Sarah Handley- Cousins;
(2019)
Bodies in blue: Disability in the Civil War north
Thesis
Nichols, Marcia D.;
(2010)
The Man-Midwife's Tale: Re-Reading Male-Authored Midwifery Guides in Britain and America, 1750--1820
Article
O'Shea, Christopher D.;
(2012)
“A Plea for the Prostate”: Doctors, Prostate Dysfunction, and Male Sexuality in Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Canada
Thesis
O'Shea, Christopher David;
(2003)
Visions of Masculinity: Home-Health Advice Literature, Medical Discourse and Male Sexuality in English-Canada, 1870--1914
Book
Schuster, David G.;
(2011)
Neurasthenic Nation America's Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869--1920
Book
Sabrina Strings;
(2019)
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Book
Kennedy, V. Lynn;
(2010)
Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South
Article
Marcellus, Jane;
(2008)
Nervous Women and Noble Savages: The Romanticized “Other” in Nineteenth-Century US Patent Medicine Advertising
Thesis
Urban, Kimberly A.;
(2002)
Anglo women's reproduction in nineteenth-century America: Three case studies of the Southwest, Midwest, and Northwest
Book
Jenifer L. Barclay;
(2021)
The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America
Article
Coleborne, Catharine;
(2012)
Insanity, Gender, and Empire: Women Living a “Loose Kind of Life” on the Colonial Institutional Margins, 1870--1910
Article
Charlotte G. Borst;
(2021)
"The Noblest Roman of them all?": Professional versus Popular Views of America's Country Doctors
Book
Shemo, Connie Anne;
(2011)
The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872--1937: On A Cross-Cultural Frontier of Gender, Race, and Nation
Be the first to comment!