The "Rest Cure" for women is notorious. But the "West Cure" for men, though little known today, is a fundamental part of American mythology.
Women suffering from neurasthenia were given the treatment that resulted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Her “nerve doctor,” Silas Weir Mitchell, regularly proscribed bed-rest, force-feeding, and total abstention from creative work for women. Even reading was banned. “Live as domestic a life as possible,” said the specialist to his women patients.
It may come as no surprise that Dr. Mitchell prescribed something entirely different for male neurasthenics. He sent them West, to the great outdoors. One of his patients, Owen Wister, wrote the first modern western. Barbara Will connects these facts in her examination of the “nervous origins of the American western,” published in American Literature in 1998.
Thanks to Gilman, the “Rest Cure” for women is notorious. But the West Cure for men, on the other hand, is little known today. Yet it’s a fundamental part of the origins of the modern western and the mythology of the West. The West Cure was a strenuous rest, a mind- and body-toughening escape from the supposedly deleterious effects of civilization. And, in opposition to what Mitchell told women to do, he urged his male patients to write about their experiences in the West.
