Patient Progress: Cornelia Meigs, Herbert J. Hall and Creative Responses to Neurasthenia, 1908-1923

In considering the role of therapeutic craft within early occupational therapy, this paper turns away from questions of professionalization, and discussions about the background and training of therapy providers.  Instead, it explores the patient's perspective and role in developing early theoretical bases for this new health profession, one that emerged in the early 20th century under the broader umbrella of rehabilitation medicine.  Based on correspondence between Dr. Herbert J. Hall and a patient, Cornelia Meigs, I investigate the negotiations over therapy that took place between this influential clinician and his patient.  Hall's prescribed 'work cure' involved patients' involvement in several therapeutic craft programs, offered as experimental treatments for neurasthenic female patients at his Devereux Mansion sanitorium in Marblehead, Massachusetts.  From a prominent Illinois family, Meigs was Hall's intermittent patient and correspondent over the 1910s and 1920s.  As an emerging writer, she was interested in creative work, but expressed ambivalence about the arts and crafts Hall prescribed. This paper considers class and gender within the matrix of clinical power, situation their relationship in the broader history of physician-patient relations in mental health rehabilitation.  It interrogates the therapeutic value that arts and crafts held for patients like Meigs.  And, through insights from this clinician-patient relationship, it also discusses how the medical and social problem of neurasthenia shaped the theoretical approach and orientation for early occupational therapy, inextricably linking it to the field of mental health and allied social service professions.