What's one of the first recommendations your doctor tells you when you're sick?

Get plenty of rest, bed rest.

In my house that often turns into couch rest,

so I can cuddle with my dogs and fall asleep with a movie in the background.

Usually a horror movie. Bed rest or as it was originally called rest cure

was first used by a Philadelphia physician in the late 1800s,

Nureologist Silas Weir Mitchell.

Dr Mitchell specialized in neurology after earning his medical degree from Jefferson Medical

College in 1850. Rest Cure was highly recommended for the treatment of physical

and emotional exhaustion, believed to be triggered by the stresses of living in a big city, working long hours, crowded streets, the constant

hustle of city living. None of that sounds all too different than what many of us endure today.

Mitchell treated patients suffering from hysteria,

and you can probably guess many of those patients were female.

It was so simple in the 19th and early 20th centuries to label a woman as an hysteric.

A wife decides she's had enough of her husband's shit and won't do what he says.

Well then, she's hysterical.

A woman who perhaps enjoys the company of men, and is unmarried.

She's hysterical too.

Let's soothe them with the rest cure, which sounds more comforting than it really was.

Rest cure was solitude.

No stimulation, no engagement with others you could be confined for weeks or months this way.

While being fed a high-fat diet, something Dr. Silas Mitchell believed made people

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