
The rest cure was intended to effectively treat hysteria and neurasthenia, as well as other mental illnesses, but was too close to solitary confinement to be effective. In reading The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the reader can see that the rest cure is not as effective as it was intended to be and did not always produce the best results. The practice of the rest cure lasted for 52 years from 1873 to 1925. However, because of its nature and strong similarities to solitary confinement, the rest cure could never be used for the true treatment of patients suffering mental illnesses.

The rest cure was created by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchel and he himself prescribed for patients suffering from mental illnesses, with mixed results. While the treatment “kept some patients alive and out of asylums” (sciencemuseum.org), it was considered worse for the patient than the actual ailment by some doctors. The rest cure was prescribed mainly for women but it was also prescribed for men suffering from any type of nervous illness like depression, hysteria or high anxiety.

The rest cure lasted only about eight weeks for most patients and included isolation from much of society, force-feeding if needed, and quite a large amount of bedrest. Patients prescribed the rest cure were also only small amounts of intellectual activity and many women patients were completely forbidden any type of reading or writing materials. In some extreme cases, patients were not even allowed to talk lest they engage the brain too much and suffer a relapse. Patients undergoing the rest cure were completely taken care of but also not allowed to care for themselves much. Nurses or maids took complete care of the patient. Everything from cooking their patients’ food to bathing their patients was included in the nurses’ duties. It was also not uncommon for nurses to need to roll the patients in their beds to prevent the formation of bed sores. To ensure that the patients’ muscles did not atrophy too much, doctors or nurses would give massages.

While the practice of the rest cure seemed to reflect good intentions, Dr. Mitchel himself “believed the point of rest cure was physical and moral (sciencemuseum.org),” but women writers such as Gilman believed the point was to break the will of the patients, many of which were women. Though forbidden the usage of writing materials while undergoing the rest cure, Gilman remembered much of her experience and would go on to write The Yellow Wallpaper, mentioned above, a semi-autobiographical story in which the main character slowly goes mad. In this story, the main protagonist is suffering from extreme nervousness and anxiety and so is prescribed the rest cure by her husband John, who is a legitimate doctor. Problems arise when she does not think that she is getting better and John basically calls her silly for keeping herself sick. Her room is also decorated with a drab, peeling yellow wallpaper with strange designs on it. As the main character is kept in this room day after day, she slowing begins to imagine that there is a strange woman trapped in the wallpaper and begins to tear the paper from the walls in an attempt to free the strange woman. Near the end of the story, Gilman’s character believes that she sees many strange women and that they are “creeping” around her house. Gilman’s character believes that she herself has come out of the wallpaper by the end of the story and begins creeping “smoothly along the floor” because that is what the other women are doing and her “shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.” (The Yellow Wallpaper 311) This story seems to detail a decent into madness as a result of the enforcing of the rest cure. This story, though technically fiction, is based on real personal experience and closely mirrors the horrors that accompanied both the rest cure and solitary confinement.

Another story which involves the rest cure and ultimately a character’s demise is The Feather Pillow by Horacio Quiroga. In this story, a young girl named Alicia is newly married and her husband, Jordan, is seemingly indifferent towards her. She takes up the habit of doing nothing at the house all day just waiting for her husband to return in the evening. She grows weak and gets the flu. To help her recover, the doctor prescribes the rest cure. Alicia never recovers and eventually dies. Now, it is discovered at the end that a parasite inside one of the bed pillows is the true killer of Alicia, but many doctors come and enforce the rest cure when she is alive because they do not know what else to do. Therefore, by extension, the rest cure aids the parasite in killing Alicia. Quiroga lived from 1878 to 1937, therefore, he would likely have encountered the rest cure at some time during his life, whether for himself or a friend or relative. It can be inferred here by the reader that Quiroga also had personal disagreements and reservations about the rest cure and its effectiveness. Though it was not the rest cure itself which actually killed Alicia in this story, its enforcement enabled the parasite to finish its work and siphon Alicia’s blood from her body, killing her.

The rest cure itself does not always look like a beneficial practice. The rest cure has some striking similarities to solitary confinement. In fact, some patients who underwent the rest cure suffered similar effects to those put in solitary confinement. Gilman’s main character in The Yellow Wallpaper, for example, obviously suffers some psychological degradation. As already mentioned, patients undergoing the rest cure were shut off from society “for their health.” While prisoners in solitary confinement are not shut away for their wellbeing, both parties are shown to suffer some mental decline if kept in their conditions for too long. As mentioned above, the rest cure included the patient being isolated from society. The patient was place in a bedroom and allowed only an hour or two of social interaction per day, though sometimes they were not allowed any social activity at all. While the rest cure most often lasted eight weeks at the longest, it was social and mental isolation for those eight weeks. During those eight weeks, everything would be very routine. Meals, baths, and whatever massage therapy was also prescribed would come at set times even if the patient was not happy about it. This type of restrictive behavior strongly reflects the situation of solitary confinement. in solitary, some prisoners begin to mentally deteriorate after only one week. Any reader can then imagine just how bad eight weeks could be for a weak mind. It is no wonder that the rest cure was considered worse than the ailment by some doctors and patients alike. It is not difficult to point out that there are definite similarities between the rest cure and solitary confinement and these similarities may be by design as both methods can be used to break the wills of those subjected to this treatment.

The situations of solitary confinement, and the dangers therein, show exactly why the rest cure failed as proper treatment for ailments. In solitary, prisoners are shut in small rooms, more akin to cubicles than actual rooms for living, furnished only with a bed, sink, and toilet. These small cells are also without windows or clocks and are constantly lit be electrical lights. This takes away any sense of time passage so many prisoners do not even know how long they have been in solitary. Prisoners are monitored at all times and are almost never without cameras or staff watching them. Prisoners in solitary are only allowed one hour of exercise per day and that is often in a small, cage-like room. This is also one of the only times that prisoners are allowed restroom privileges. While solitary confinement is intended to be a short-term internment, many prisoners actually endure it for years and almost none emerge still sane or socially able. Prisoners often refuse to leave their cells and sometimes cannot even imagine life outside of their cells. These prisoners also do not have mirrors in their so when they do see their reflection again, they do not recognize themselves. All this pushes inmates to the edges of their sanity and often times over the edge. To quote Heath Ledger’s Joker, “See madness, as you know, is like gravity; all it takes is a little push.” (The Dark Knight)

The rest cure could not work effectively as a proper treatment for depression or high anxiety, especially in the time of its conception because of the lack of knowledge doctors had of the human psyche. While the rest cure did last for half a century, it may have done more harm than good during its years of practice. The parallels between the rest cure and solitary confinement are too frequent to be healthy or helpful. In both cases, those subjected to it are placed in a room alone and onto a very rigorous daily schedule. Set times for meals, extremely limited time outside the room, and little to no social interaction. Patients on the rest cure might be allowed an hour or two of social time but almost never any intellectual stimulation. Inmates in solitary are only rarely allowed visitors and are never allowed any type of radio or television. Inmates are not allowed any reading materials without the express permission of the warden or other high-ranking prison staff and corrections officers. More dangerous than the physical or social isolation of solitary or the rest cure is the mental isolation and degradation that occurs. This is most closely linked to the social isolation aspect. Because humans are community-based beings, social interaction is necessary to maintain a healthy mind. Without these elements, the human mind decays and creates construct to try and survive. Proof of this comes in the form of the hallucinations that many inmates in solitary experience. In Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the main character sees the creeping women. In Quiroga’s The Feather Pillow, Alicia sees an anthropoid “poised on his fingertips on the carpet, staring at her.” (Pillow 3) She also sees her “crepuscular terrors [coming] in the form of monsters that spread themselves toward [her] bed and laboriously climbed upon the bedspread.” (Pillow 4) Because of the similar results of both solitary confinement and the rest cure, the reader can determine how negative the rest cure could actually be for a patient subjected to it. The mental decay of both patients and inmates is apparent and directly linked to their lack of contact to the outside world. Because of its nature, the rest cure was never able to be a one hundred percent effective type of treatment for patients with mental disorders or ailments.

In all, the rest cure could never work as a proper solution or treatment of mental illnesses and disorders because it was too close in similarity to solitary confinement. In retrospect, the rest cure may have been originally intended as an early way of using solitary confinement on women of the late 1800s to break their wills and make them more submissive to men.
