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Overall, the trip to London and Paris did little to improve Mitchell’s health or lift his spirits. Among the wealthy class of Londoners, he found considerable sympathy for the South and outright hostility for the North.In the various clubs and resorts that he frequented, he did not meet a single person “who was not our enemy....All the literary folk of England,the banking class,the professions, and generally the titled classes were against us so that it became at last too depressing for a man in search of renewed vigor.” He knew no one, and amid the “young fashionables, guardsmen and diplomats,” he described himself as a “lonely, somewhat depressed man.”1 On the Saturday night before the battle of the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama, Mitchell overheard a group of men betting heavily on the Alabama. He was especially taken with one of the young gamblers,and,calling him aside, advised him to change his bet. The Alabama, built in secrecy in northwest England in 1862, was a Confederate raider that had captured or burned sixty-five Union merchant ships.The Kearsarge,built in Maine in 1861,pursued Confederate raiding ships in European waters, and it finally caught up with the Alabama in Cherbourg Harbor. One hour after the start of the battle, the Alabama surrendered and then sank. Forty-one of its crew members, including the captain , escaped capture when a private British yacht rescued them. Mitchell, in his poem“Kearsarge,”wrote that the guns of the two warships were heard in the churches along the English Channel as the summer winds stole through the windows , and “passed the oaken door, / And fluttered open prayer-books / With the cannon’s awful roar.” After the battle Mitchell dined with the young gambler , and over the wine “ventured to ask him whether he had lost much the night before.” But the gambler had changed his bet and won £3,000. He told Mitchell,“You saved my life. . . . It will pay all my debts and set me free.”2 5 wind and tide e 05 Chapter 5_Cervetti 6/27/2012 1:56 PM Page 88 Back in Philadelphia, as the war raged on, Mitchell’s health deteriorated. A clause in the Draft Act of 1863 allowed men to be exempt or to resign from the military by paying a substitute to serve in their place. Mitchell paid $400 for a substitute to serve a three-year term and resigned his position at Turner’s Lane. He explained to Keen,“I have been ill or should have written before. Just after your traps arrived, per porter, I took a big diphtheria + a double quinsy—a droll mixture—but it nearly ended me.And now here I am at the close of February —just beginning to feel that I shall ever be myself again. There is a great hiatus full of aches and nausiaus doses—mustard plasters,slow,long,lazy days of convalescence and lots of no work done—my health forced from me a resignation of my nerve hospital. It went hard—you know how hard.” Mitchell had contracted a severe case of diphtheria,and his“double quinsy”consisted of two pus-filled growths near his tonsils. Keen, who had also left Turner’s Lane, was in Paris studying with Mitchell’s old friend and teacher Robin.Mitchell warned him that“in all things save morals you will profit.That is unless he has changed nucleus and cell—as to his whole economy.” In the letter Mitchell also wrote about his investments, including property in California—that “fairy land of oil”—at one dollar an acre. He asked Keen to keep “a lookout on things physiological —especially when you go to Germany—write me about contraptions of all sorts.” He also asked for photographs of noteworthy men in physiology and medicine.3 Although details about this year of poor health and breakdown are scarce,Mitchell wrote two literary works, The Autobiography of a Quack and In War Time, which represent some of the fears, temptations, and insecurities of the life of a doctor.In 1867,hoping to“call the attention of the public to the various devices of quacks and charlatans,” he published The Autobiography of a Quack anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly. When he revised the story in 1899,he wrote that he only regretted “that it was not set at a later period when christian science could have been made to figure.”4 On the...

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