Medicines of the Soul: Reparative Reading and the History of Bibliotherapy

Abstract

f at the end of the nineteenth century Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell famously forbade Charlotte Perkins Gilman from reading or writing as part of her treatment for neurasthenia (Gilman 96), today it seems doctors are more likely to prescribe reading as a cure than to censor it. This intentional use of reading for the promotion of mental and emotional health is commonly known as bibliotherapy. Book historian Leah Price has written of recent bibliotherapeutic literary public health programs in the UK like Books on Prescription and Mood Boosting Books. These programs receive funding from the National Health Service and enable physicians to prescribe self-help books, fiction, and poetry to patients suffering from various mild to moderate psychiatric conditions. And some researchers have recently sought to empirically study the psychological effects of reading literary texts, most notably Keith Oatley.This essay argues that despite its significance within the history of bibliotherapy, Samuel McChord Crothers's 1916 essay "A Literary Clinic" is a stranger point of origin than proponents have realized-one with implica-