A continuum is said to be Suslinian if it does not contain uncountably many mutually exclusive nondegenerate subcontinua. We prove that Suslinian continua are perfectly normal and rim-metrizable. Locally connected Suslinian continua have weight at most $\omega_1$ and under appropriate set-theoretic conditions are metrizable. Non-separable locally connected Suslinian continua are rim-finite on some open set.