Nerves Redux

We might have thought that the concept of nerves ended in 1957 when the United States Post Office Department initiated a fraud proceeding against John Winters of New York City, who had been promoting a product called Orbacine containing bromide and niacin for “every-day nervousness and its symptoms.” Although Winters’ claims went a bit beyond nerves, the Post Office wanted an end to the whole business and Orbacine disappeared. But the concept of nerves had enemies other than the Post Office. Three in particular had tried to do away with it: psychoanalysis, psychopharmacology, and the DSM series. All failed to kill it completely, and the concept lingers on because of its obvious face value: Our patients clearly have a nervous illness or something resembling it. They do not have a “mood disorder.” In medicine the nervous syndrome, the condition that dare not speak its name, has taken on various allures. Once upon a time, hysteria was the equivalent of a nervous diagnosis in women. There were physicians who had little patience with calling their former hysteric patients “depressed”: They remained hysteric! Jacques Frei, a member of the department of psychiatry of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, noted in 1984 “the importance that depressive symptomatology has taken today as a call for help among female hysterics. . . . It seems that the hysterical woman today has a better chance of a hearing if she presents with a depressive picture, even evoking suicidal ideas.” Although hysteria today is discredited as a diagnosis, it is interesting that older clinicians such as Frei saw it as a diagnosis that trumped depression; he even argued that his patients at Cery Hospital were modeling their symptoms to conform to the new diagnoses. The 1950s and 1960s saw alternative diagnoses to the nervous syndrome come and go, fragments of clinical experience that seemed to make sense to individual physicians but were not more widely taken up because their originators did not have prestigious academic appointments. Take “the housewife syndrome” that Palma Formica proposed in 1962.

The Writing on the Wall: Treasury Section Murals in New Deal Louisiana

Up in Bienville Parish, through piney hills rolling toward the Ozarks, the road winds down a sweeping curve, rises abruptly, and enters Arcadia, Louisiana. Main Street parallels an abandoned railroad spur and runs along eighty yards of brick-faced storefronts. The usual concerns flourish: a flower shop, an insurance agency, the pharmacy, and a secondhand furniture store. There is also a Baptist revival hall, but people point it out for another reason. Years before it was a house of the Lord, the building was a home for the dead, a funeral parlor, and as such, briefly, the focal point of national attention. That was in 1934 when, shortly after the sheriff sprang his trap, the corpses of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were fetched back to town and propped on slabs leaning in the undertaker's window. Tellers of the tale usually smile at the irony, but it is not the only one Arcadians can claim. Across the street and down the block from the morguecumrevival hall stands a United States post office built during the Great Depression. It conforms to the standard floor plan then in vogue, and at one end of the main hall, over the postman's door, hangs a mural whose warm pastels depict an abundant cotton harvest. Black pickers dot the field, sacks filled to bursting. A white driver crests the hill in a wagon brimming over with the yield and descends a road leading toward the mill. Surrounding hills stretch beyond (Figure 1).