In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom at Dalnavert Museum, a small, square, yellow and red box announces its contents as “NERVE FOOD” in large black letters. Underneath, the packaging reads: “strengthens the nerves, purifies the blood. For the treatment of anaemia, nervous debility, loss of appetite, run down conditions of the system.” Small yellow letters printed against a red band identify the maker as “The Toronto Pharmacal Co.” At the top, also in a red band, the initials “T.P.” are printed in yellow, angular font and framed by a pair of exotic-looking five-fringed fans. The thin cardboard of the box shows signs of wear and tear, with both pealing edges and surface-level scratches. Inside the box, there is a short, yellow cylindrical container for the nerve food pills. Its face shares the Toronto Pharmacal logo with “NERVE FOOD” written in the same style as the medicine box. Never opened, the text on this vial reads: “net contents 100.” These little pills would likely produce a maraca-like rattle if someone shook the container.

Nerve Food is a nineteenth-century patent medicine, a supplement marketed as a way to improve its consumer’s biological supply of nerve force. For context, scholar Susan Cayleff explains that nerve force was a nineteenth-century term for “the amount of nervous energy possessed,” a “finite entity which…must be zealously guarded.”¹ For many Victorians, conserving one’s nerve force was essential for avoiding the effects of nervousness, a condition they understood as a “disease of the nervous system identifiable by mental and physical exhaustion.”² Formulated by Toronto Phamacal to protect against a depletion of nerves, Nerve Food contains among other ingredients, phosphide, arsenic and strychnine. Essentially, Nerve Food was used to treat deficient nerve force, which would manifest various nervous disorders that could, in turn, lead to “bodily decline.”³

Because disorders of the nerves were understood as an almost exclusively female condition, patent medicines like this one provide insight into nineteenth-century gender ideology. According to scholar Erin Wilson, the affliction of the nerves was presented as “at its very core, female.”⁴ Nerve Food was marketed toward women, a fact that is made clear by an 1886 newspaper advertisement for Moxie Nerve Food, a rival brand. That advertisement describes Nerve Food as the “best preparation for nervous, debilitated women.”⁵ The attribution of nervous disorders to women is due, in part, to the perception of women as the weaker sex: as more emotionally and physiologically vulnerable than men. Women were, for example, seen as so emotionally vulnerable that they “inevitably suffer from nerves because of romantic disappointments,”⁶ or love-sickness. It was widely accepted that a woman had a natural nervous susceptibility due to “her smaller natural endowment of nerve force and the demands placed on her system by her physiology.”⁷ These physiological demands included “puberty, menses, childbearing and menarche.”⁸ Evidently, women’s natural bodily functions and supposedly heightened emotions were thought to pose a danger to their physical health. An approach to women’s health that is fraught with misogynistic and limiting views about women, the diagnosis of nervousness as a female malady reveals how medicine both shaped and was shaped by gender values.

Consider, for example, the ways in which the treatment of nervous disorders reinforces the perception of women as submissive, unintellectual, and dedicated to the bearing and rearing of children. Intellectual pursuits were suspected to be a drain on women’s limited nerve force, thus: “numerous intelligent and inquisitive women were dissuaded by physicians from pursuing ‘brain work’ on the grounds that it was the cause of their debility.”⁹ This reveals how the treatment for nervous disorders had an oppressive effect on women, limiting their access to education. Similarly, women were encouraged to refrain from “exuberant activities (social, sexual, physical, and mental),”¹⁰ to avoid depleting their nerve force. Medicalized and pathologized by the rigid confines of what patriarchy defines as normal and acceptable sexuality, women’s purportedly unnatural sexuality became linked to nervous disorders.¹¹ Similarly, indulging in alcohol could be considered an exuberant and immoral activity for women. Nerve Food promised to right this unnatural behavior in women. An 1886 newspaper advertisement states that: “it takes away the appetite for liquor at once and completely.”¹² This further reinforces the binary of what is considered natural, and proper, for a woman. The medical discouragement of women’s deviation from assigned gender roles works to oppress women, limiting them intellectually, socially, and sexually.

In essence, the box of Nerve Food in the bathroom at Dalnavert Museum provides insight into the gender ideologies of the nineteenth century. The classification of the nervous disorders this patent medicine was designed to treat as primarily female conditions reveals widely held beliefs about women’s emotional and physical vulnerability and their inferiority to men. These beliefs were so pervasive that women were labelled as susceptible to nervous illness and in need of protection from their own physiology. That protection took the form of Nerve Food supplements. The anxiety surrounding the conservation of women’s nerve force both reflected and reinforced limits placed on women’s behavior. Discouraged from intellectual pursuits and excessive socializing, their sexuality pathologized and scrutinized, women were encouraged to purchase and consume a medication for ills that clearly had more to do with oppressive patriarchy than with biology. Essentially, it is in this sense that this little box of Nerve Food functions as a window into gender ideology in the nineteenth century.