Neurasthenia

“Ethic identity infiltrated so deeply into the definitions of nervousness that Cabot and many of his Boston peers made the extraordinary identification of a separate Jewish racial variant of nervousness. . . ‘racial neurasthenia,’ ‘Hebraic debility,’ ‘jew-neurasthenia,’ and ‘Jewish psychoneurosis.’ . . . (Crenner II, 164) . . . Nervousness predisposition was a serviceable conduit for the influence of racially determined differences on unitary physical disease. . . similar connections between race and nervous temperament occurred to physicians contemplating putative racial differences in syphilis (169-70). . . . The nervous system provided a useful link between fixed disease and the fluid effects of racial circumstances or vaguely defined inherent differences in ‘racial character,’ ‘sexual energy,’ or ‘moral tendencies.’ Race and nervousness, in fact, occupied somewhat analogous roles in the application of objective, scientific analysis to medicine. . . Whether understood as inherent or imposed, both racial and nervous characteristics often took the role of mediators between the natural biology of human disease and the contingent effects of personal habits and social conditions” (172). . . . Boston’s Protestant physicians demonstrated a frustration with Jewish nervousness that served to highlight their contrasting satisfaction in handling physical disorders. The difficulties of evaluating nervousness might be redeemed by diagnostic perseverance, so that by acknowledging racial propensities to unreliability, the physician could transcend these obstacles to find the source of ‘real pain.’ In a case of diabetes, for example, a physician might reassert the clarity of medical control even in a setting where nervousness seemed to predominate. Racial hierarchies in reliability assisted in this process. . . . A patient’s racial identity situated him or her within a hierarchy of reliability in reporting symptoms” (178-179).