Featured on PDR in the collection Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874)

Asked why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891), a now infamous critique of “the rest cure”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman recounted her own treatment for neurasthenia. Forbidden by her doctor from intellectual labor and confined to the domestic sphere, she was brought “so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” Seventeen years earlier, in the preface to Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874), a book that gathers real swaths of arsenic wallpaper sourced from stores across Michigan, physician Robert Clark Kedzie made his own evaluation of treatments for nervous exhaustion, offering a peculiar chemical theory for the descent into madness during bed rest. From Kedzie’s perspective, Gilman’s narrator — who believed that her boudoir wallpaper bore a “vicious influence”…