Dr. Clair's Place

1915
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Dr. Clair's Place
B-

A depressed woman is saved from suicidal thoughts by visiting the title location, a benign sanitorium, where visitors perform positive, interesting tasks in a wholesome location somewhere in the Southern California hills.  The irony that Gilman would herself commit suicide twenty years later, after being diagnosed with breast cancer, is heart-breaking.  As Yellow Wallpaper shows, she knew that "rest cures" didn't always cure.  And there are some lives that may be too unbearable to continue.  Knitting and jigsaw puzzles are not enough.  But as a suggestion of reform for sanitoriums, it's still an insightful work.

By the way, there are now more posts for the 1910s than for any other decade.  This took awhile because most of the ones for the sixteenth century are from the 1590s.  There are still more posts for the nineteenth century than the twentieth, but we're well on our way.