Nervous Women pounds on 139 began with milk and gradually a diet that substantial meals a day Mitchell was well aware and sensory deprivation of the rest cure built up to several that the sheer made boredom punishment a kindly it for neurasthenia, the psychological equivalent of the hysteric's bucket of water: "When they are bidden to stay read, write, nor sew, rest becomes and have one nurse some women for in bed month, and neither to a — who is not a relative a rather bitter medicine, when glad enough to accept the order to rise and go about — then and they are the doctor mandate which has become pleasantly welcome and eagerly issues a looked for." 55 Although it had the medical rationale of building up the depleted supply of fat and blood, the cal effects Mitchell insisted patient on isolation both as a own his The nist historians the enforced way of among contemporary femi- Barbara Sicherman points out the similarities between dependency of the rest cure and infancy, and suggests that such a temporary yielding up of the will charismatic physician women who were may in childlike unable to accept their own some emotions and dependen- But other feminist historians see Mitchell women who obedience to a actually have been restorative for as the benignly paternal guardian, but as a hostility to as a misogynistic implications of the rest cure have been the subject of controversy 56 of removing the semimagical influence over her, an influence he believed essential to a cure cies way from the sympathetic collusion of her family and maximizing patient's had striking psychologi- rest cure in a harsher light, man unaware of his not own "cured" them by "restoring them to their femininity or by subordinating them to an enlightened but dictatorial male will." Forced back into "womblike dependence," the patient was reborn, re-educated by the parental team of subservient female nurse and godlike male doctor, and "returned to her menfolk's manage- ment, recycled and taught to make the will of the male her own." 57 Yet another aspect of the rest cure emerges in the practice Playfair, professor of obstetric medicine at King's College, duced Mitchell's rest cure to the adoption of Mitchell's England method for in the 1880s Playfair women of who W S intro- suggested suffering from neuras- worn and woman, who had broken down, either from such as grief, or money losses, or excessive mental thenia associated with pregnancy problems, and for "the wasted, often bedridden some sudden shock, or bodily strain." 58 Whereas Playfair resented the "fat, well-feeding hysterics who thor-