“The Ghost in Search of Help”: Silas Weir Mitchell’s Sentimental Quarantine, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Sympathetic Utopia, and Sigmund Freud’s Mitleidsimitation

Abstract

For the hardship imposed on patients, Silas Weir Mitchell’s Rest Cure remains notorious. This essay reconstructs Mitchell’s philosophy of care, primarily scrutinizing his understanding of sympathy as a vector for the person-to-person transmission of mental illness. The praxis of sequestration central to Rest Cure methodology functioned as a quarantine measure, designed to prevent bystanders from interacting sympathetically with ailing patients and acquiring analogous disorders. Engagements with the antisympathetic components of Mitchell’s treatment had a formative impact on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a former patient, and Sigmund Freud, a Rest Cure practitioner. Gilman would later fashion sympathy into an emancipatory force for utopia. Freud would become disillusioned with the Rest Cure by the time of Studies on Hysteria, even as the volume’s case histories conform to a paradigm of contagious neuroses. Freud remained cautious of sympathy’s pathological properties, and his concerns survive in psychoanalytic prohibitions against emotive interface between doctor and patient.