A fascinating account of one 1909 woman’s personal experience of neurasthenia, and her thoughts and beliefs about the illness. Disguised as an account by another woman, Autobiography of a Neurasthene, as told by one of them is actually a memoir by Margaret A. Cleaves, MD.
Of the illness, she argues, for example,
It is a condition too little understood and appreciated by the average physician.
The suffering of the essential neurasthene is not imaginary by any means. It is as real as the pain from a fractured bone. But because of the absence of anatomic lesions or a pathological anatomy, the pathological physiology is ignored… and its genuineness questioned.