BOOK REVIEW : Old Malady Has Familiar Ring : AMERICAN NERVOUSNESS, 1903: An Anecdotal History <i> by Tom Lutz</i> ; Cornell University Press $29.95; 336 pages, illustrated

“Yuppie flu,” a shadowy but genuine ailment with no known cause or cure, is nothing new despite its trendy name.

Listen to this turn-of-the-century litany of complaints:

“Do you ever feel generally miserable or suffer with a thousand and one indescribable bad feelings, both mental and physical, among them low spirits, nervousness, weariness, lifelessness, weakness, headache, blurring of eyesight, irritability, poor memory, throbbing, gurgling or rumbling sensations in the bowels, palpitation of heart, drowsiness after meals but wakefulness at night, languor in the morning, and a constant feeling of dread, as if something awful was going to happen?”

In 1903, this malady was called neurasthenia or, more popularly, “nervousness.” In those days the disease, which doctors now call “chronic fatigue syndrome,” attacked men and women of the middle and upper classes often enough to spawn an entire industry of cures.

For author Tom Lutz, a professor of English literature at the University of Iowa, it provides a window on the psychology of intellectual Americans at the dawn of the Modern Age.

The cures for men stricken by neurasthenia tended toward strenuous work and recreation on ranches. Following such a regimen, Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly and effeminate young man into the famous Rough Rider and big-game hunter of his later years, Lutz writes in this dense and abstract but nonetheless absorbing treatise.

Women found to have neurasthenia were treated the opposite of men. In fact, they were forced into near-total sensory deprivation, Lutz writes. Their private doctors and nurses fed them the blandest possible diet, permitted no visitors, books or other forms of stimulation, enforcing the strict regimen by constant surveillance. The novelist Edith Wharton began her writing career under such circumstances, Lutz writes.

Although Lutz has much to say about the gender politics of the masculine-versus-feminine cures for neurasthenia, he is more interested in the disease itself. A nervous breakdown provided a temporary refuge for “brain workers,” especially for popular authors and philosophers, in the face of unprecedented social and technological upheaval.

Some of these thoughtful and sensitive Americans felt swamped by such wonders as the telephone, automobile and transatlantic cable, to say nothing of Frank Lloyd Wright’s stark architecture and Max Planck’s new physics. The list of people who took cures for neurasthenia around 1903 includes many of the most widely read authors of the time: Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry James and his brother William, William Dean Howells and Frank Norris, among many others.

Lutz’s approach to the illness is unusual. Rather than tell a narrative story of neurasthenia from its beginning to its disappearance as a medical category, the author slices out the year 1903 from American history. He can thus examine neurasthenia in a far more detailed cultural, economic and political context than a conventional history would have allowed.

Happily for the reader, Lutz can’t resist a good anecdote. One story, intended to show the efficacy of urgent action as a cure for the blues, is taken from an obscure cowboy’s memoir.

A group of exhausted trail riders is sitting around a campfire after dinner, swapping yarns. That afternoon they had buried a comrade who had fallen under the hoofs of the cattle they were herding. Taking turns describing similar fatal mishaps they had seen, they sink into a funk. Suddenly the cattle, inadequately watered and bedded down by the distracted cowboys, begin to stampede. The men spring into their saddles and plunge into the herd, their depression banished.

Unhappily, however, Lutz usually writes for only his fellow literature professors. He slings lit-crit jargon, bending over backward to make simple notions appear complex. He also feels compelled to propose bold new interpretations of already well-mined literary texts. This can lead to such absurdities as his straight-faced claim that Buck, the dog hero of Jack London’s “Call of the Wild,” has many of the marks of the “recovering neurasthenic.”

The fascinating facts and memorable anecdotes scattered throughout “American Nervousness” cry for a shapely vessel to contain them. The book leaves this reader well fed but wishing the author had followed cookbook author Fannie Farmer’s advice on serving neurasthenics: “Never give a patient custard scooped out from a large cooking dish. He wants to feel that he is being particularly looked out for, and the individual custard suits him.”

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “What Can You Do for Your Country: An Oral History of the Peace Corps” by Karen Schwarz (William Morrow).