An Absence of Human Touch

After reading Brittany Thomas' paper about the, Relative Absence of Human Touch in "The Yellow Wallpaper," I feel like she's really got something here. She's stating that massage therapy was a part of Gilman's personal rest cure therapy, and that it draws question to why she did not include this in her story, The Yellow Wallpaper. I would have to admit that this is not something that I really took into consideration so it was an interesting paper to read. She did good research on the rest cure, which was good and overall it gave me a slightly better understanding of the story. However, Im not completely sold on her arguements. She was saying that S. Weir Mitchell exposed massage therapy as a part of his rest cure therapy, and was saying that he thought it was," a tonic of extraordinary value." But it confused me when she was saying that he wouldn't perform massage therapy himself. I felt like it wasn't a very strong arguement on his behalf saying that it was valuable but never doing it to see the other reactions of different rest cure patients. Because of this I guess it sort of made me devalue her arguement.