Schaffner, Anna Katharina · The Journal of medical humanities · 2016 · DOI
This article examines how doctors and thinkers over the past 300 years have understood and written about exhaustion-related illnesses. The author looks at six historical examples to show how medical ideas about exhaustion have been connected to broader changes in society and technology, rather than being purely biological problems.
This analysis is valuable for ME/CFS patients and researchers because it critically examines how exhaustion-related conditions have historically been understood through cultural and social lenses, which may illuminate ongoing diagnostic and conceptual challenges. Understanding the history of how exhaustion has been pathologized can help contextualize current debates about ME/CFS etiology and prevent oversimplified causality claims.
This essay does not provide empirical biomedical evidence about ME/CFS mechanisms, pathophysiology, or causation. It does not establish what actually causes exhaustion-related illnesses but rather analyzes how different historical periods theorized exhaustion. The work is historiographical rather than experimental and cannot confirm or refute specific biological hypotheses about modern exhaustion conditions.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
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