S. Weir Mitchell, 1829-1914

Since his death in 1914, Silas Weir Mitchell has continued to inspire a new biography every decade or so. Each strives to correct the elisions of the previous and to capture Mitchell's several, diverse talents. The newest addition by Nancy Cervetti helpfully collects the many Mitchells otherwise dispersed across previous biographies by Beverley R. Tucker (1914), Anna Robeson Burr (1929), Ernest Earnest (1950), David M. Rein (1952), Richard D. Walter (1970), and Joseph P. Lovering (1971). In Cervetti's definitive account of Mitchell's life, she establishes his centrality to a scholarly understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical research and education in the United States—and American culture more broadly. The Mitchell that herein coalesces is a man of influence. On the one hand, he was a renowned international medical researcher, specializing in poisons and nervous disorders, whose work on the latter was admired by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud. He was considered, by some, an accomplished author, and Hugh Wynne (1896), his most popular novel, sold over five hundred thousand copies in the first ten years after publication. He claimed as confidants Episcopal bishop Phillips Brooks, medical luminary Sir William Osler, and fellow literary physician Oliver Wendell Holmes and was the patron of Walt Whitman. On the other hand, his work on poisons attracted the vitriol of anti-vivisectionists, who vilified Mitchell for killing countless animals in decades of research. His idealization of women as docile and domesticated raised the ire of many. For example, physician Mary Putnam Jacobi advocated, contra Mitchell, for women's right to attend medical school. In her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” author Charlotte Perkins Gilman—Mitchell's former patient and beneficiary of his ground-breaking rest cure for nervous ailments—used him as a convenient symbol of a patriarchal system she sought to reject. In contrast to previous biographies, then, Cervetti's account gives us the complete Weir Mitchell, with all of his triumphs and flaws.

Art history · Biography · Environmental ethics · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · American History and Culture · American Sports and Literature · Classics · History · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Philosophy · Psychology