THE TEDDY TREATMENT

Atlantic Unbound | June 21, 2005

POLITICS & PROSE | by Jack Beatty

THE TEDDY TREATMENT

Theodore Roosevelt—"master therapist of the middle class"
.....
Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches
by Theodore Roosevelt
The Library of America

Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders, An Autobiography
by Theodore Roosevelt
The Library of America
In American Nervousness (1881), George Beard, a Yale-educated physician, identified a new illness—"neurasthenia," or "the lack of nerve force." Its symptoms included "fear of responsibility, of open places or closed places, fear of society, fear of being alone, fear of fears ... fear of everything." Among its "exciting causes" were changes in technology and culture, including "steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women." The railroad's introduction of scheduled hurry was emblematic of these changes, which drained the nerves of "brain workers," office-bound men and, in increasing numbers, women of the emergent middle class. Beard's diagnosis caught on. Soon the press was referring to "our neurasthenia epidemic."
Beard followed American Nervousness with the posthumously-published Sexual Neurasthenia, which discussed a symptom found among his male patients, "genital debility." A former business partner of Thomas Edison's, Beard recommended electrotherapy to the "lazy" parts, but the "masculine principle" in society was not so easily restored. "The whole generation is feminized," Basil Ransom, the Southern hero of Henry James's 1886 novel, The Bostonians, bursts out to Verena Tarrant, the Boston spiritualist he wants to save from her lesbian handlers and possess for himself:
The masculine tone is passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which if we don't soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been.