Of Ether and Colloidal Gold - Esoterica - Michigan State University

Utromania frequently results in mediomania. . . . The angle at
which the womb is suspended in the pelvis frequently settles the whole
question of sanity or insanity. Tilt the organ a little forward—introvert it,
and immediately the patient forsakes her home, embraces some strong
ultraism—Mormonism, Mesmerism, Fourierisim, Socialism, oftener
Spiritualism. She becomes possessed by the idea that she has some
startling mission in the world. She forsakes her home, her children, her
duty, to mount the rostrum and proclaim the peculiar virtues of free-love,
elective affinity, or the reincarnation of souls. 24
The neurologist William Alex Hammond, a professor at
New York City University and Bellevue Hospital and author of The
Physics and Physiology of Spiritualism, dismissed Spiritualism as
a fraudulent enterprise resulting from hysteria. A second enlarged
edition published in 1876 was more straightforward in linking
mental illness to Spiritualism. It was titled, Spiritualism and Allied
Causes of Nervous Derangement. 25 The prevailing view of medical
men was that women must not be independent and exercise their
own will. Female patients must be entirely subjugated to the will of
the doctor. In this way they were to be treated exactly like children,
whose self will must be broken. This was the basis of the “rest
cure” for newly delivered mothers devised by Dr. Weir Mitchell,
the effects of which are so vividly described in Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s harrowing novel The Yellow Wallpaper, which chronicles
her descent into madness while under the care of Weir Mitchell.
From these examples, it is clear that what passed for
the “scientific” wisdom of the period provided the seemingly
impregnable foundation for the categorical denial of women’s
capabilities in any role other than that of wife and mother.
Woman’s great and enduring function was that of reproduction.
As one can see from this grossly sentimental picture by
Thomas Cooper Gotch, motherhood became an obsession:
18