Explain what the commonly held view of sickness and health is in the yellow wallpaper

In that the story was intended by Gilman as a direct rebuke to her doctor – Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a leading mental health practitioner of his day – it thematically addresses the failings of late nineteenth century understanding and treatment. With the benefit perspective, modern readers recognize that Gilman and her fictional counterpart suffered from what is now commonly referred to as “post-partum depression” – an acute mental illness that some women suffer to varying extents following childbirth. At the time Gilman was writing, and suffering depression, mental illnesses were not recognized as having any physiological origin and were treated as though the sufferer’s mind simply made them up. For his reason, John refuses to consider his wife’s condition an illness. In fact, precisely because he is a doctor, he is incapable of considering it anything more than failure on his wife’s part to overcome the deleterious effects of her imagination. The Narrator alludes to this situation from the start: “John is a physician, and perhaps…that is the reason I do not get well faster.” This not only serves to underscore the stolid, male-centric practice of medicine at the time; it frames the Narrator’s predicament :“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing physically the matter with one but temporary nervous depression…what is one to do?”