Greater Kennebec Valley
24
Women’s Mental Health circa 1900 An early history of AMHI
by Charles Francis
A
round 1900, brittleness was regarded as one of the most telling symptoms for doctors dealing with women’s mental health issues. One description of the condition reads “ it was if all the suppleness had literally leaked out of their tissues; so that where the healthy female is a relatively flexible manner of creature, the depleted specimens…[look] as if one were to tap them, they would give out a sound like glass shattering.” Brittleness was just one symptom or a compendium of poor mental health manifestations generally lumped under the heading of female nervous disorders. Among the more clinical terms for female nervous disorders of the late
1800 and early 1900s one finds melancholia and its relative mania; neurasthenia, a disease whose hold on the weaker sex had greatly strengthened in the years following the Civil War; and hysteria, whose very name (from the Greek hysterikos, for womb) spoke to its female associativeness. A fair number of doctors of the time period under discussion here believed that, more times than not, the original impetus to female disease was neurotic. Other opted to lump most female problems under the heading of neurasthenia. Neurasthenia symptoms included fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia and depressed mood. It so typified the period of the post-Civil War years that
it was sometimes called “Americanitis.” In 1900 and earlier, melancholia was generally regarded as a mood disorder of non-specific depression. Its characteristics included low levels of enthusiasm and little eagerness for activity. Each of the mental health issues mentioned above had their particular proponents. The great Harvard psychologist William James was a firm believer in the debilitating circumstances associated with neurasthenia. It was James who coined the sobriquet “Americanitis.” Sigmund Freud spoke to hysteria. One of the more prominent authorities on melancholia was a Maine man, Bigelow Sanborn. Dr. Bi(continued on page 26) a Fe
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