hich tax so heavily the nervous system of man. (110)Mitchell's belief as a top nerve specialist that women are risking their bodily health by taxing their weak brains emphasizes the misinformation regarding the medical model of hysteria that was prevalent in the nineteenth century.Gilman had first-hand knowledge of the aftereffects of the "rest cure." Mitchell treated her for a severe depression that followed the birth of her daughter, Katherine, during her first marriage to Charles Stetson. She notes how her experiences with Mitchell served as the inspiration behind the writing of "The Yellow Wallpaper" in her essay "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?":For many years, I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia&emdash;and beyond. During the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live a domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over. (106)Gilman's personal experiences with Dr. Mitchell revealed the fallacies in his belief that overtaxing a weak brain caused hysteria. Gilman's own experiences revealed the true cause of her melancholia: refraining from her innate desire to write. She concluded after her abstinence of writing that "work is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite…"(106). Gilman concluded that the denial of intellectual activity led to the disintegration of self-worth.Gilman directly implicat...
