A lot of past medical practices strike us as instantly absurd -- all that nasty bloodletting, for a start. But time was when otherwise sensible professionals didn't think twice about applying cures that flew in the face of logic, not to mention common sense or common decency.
One of the most egregious of treatments, prescribed for women who didn't seem themselves after childbirth, became the subject of an influential short story in the 1890s -- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman. That story has now been transformed into an opera.
