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Looking back over the years, Mitchell was, for the most part, pleased with the view.The hurt of losing the chairs at the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College had all but healed due to what he had accomplished since that time. The expansion and growing prestige of the Infirmary of Nervous Diseases provided endless clinical opportunities that fed the success of the rest cure. This happy union was matched in his personal life by his marriage and children (two sons and a daughter). There was also the trusteeship at the University of Pennsylvania and an impressive list of publications.Even so,when he turned fifty in 1879, he looked back only momentarily. Mitchell began to spend less and less time in Philadelphia.Counting his fishing trips, summers at Newport and then Bar Harbor, and numerous trips to Europe,he was spending half the year away from the infirmary and private practice . Increasingly, he focused on writing literature. Early in his career, Oliver Wendell Holmes had encouraged him to“remember Hall and Goethe and make the most of both your talents by either of which I have no doubt you can achieve a reputation.”1 But others warned him that patients would distrust a doctor who wrote poems. He submitted a few poems and stories that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Lippincott’s Magazine, but fearing what others might think, he published anonymously or used the pseudonym “Edward Kearsley.” At the same time, writing remained immensely important to him. In the autobiography he wrote,“If I had not had to earn my own bread and that of others in my youth,it is probable that I would have given my life to literature.”2 He told John,“At 15—I came near to being a merchant—Later I hankered after—manufacturing chemistry—and all along played with the notion of literature as a life pursuit—but all thro.life it has been to me a real comfort for to sketch with 8 the literary physician e 08 Chapter 8_Cervetti 6/27/2012 1:58 PM Page 156 words is even more useful than with pencil, more useful and—as pleasant. So all along I have never let go of literature and the skill of pen I have won has been of great value when I came to put the graver things of science on paper.”3 Now, at fifty, wealthy and powerfully established, he could really express his desire to write literature. Spending half of each year away from the city’s dust and heat,it was Mitchell ’s habit to write all morning and then walk or ride for two to three hours in the afternoon.From June to October,shedding his identity as a physician,he worked diligently to become a poet and novelist.He often spoke about this double life of winter doctor and summer writer, especially about the abrupt transition between the two. He told Harvey Cushing,“I often reflect with some interest on the influence upon a man of sudden changes of occupation.On my return home I find myself fully taken up by patients and consultations, and by more or less of public duties connected with institutions. I think I could no more have written the Lycian Tomb in winter than I could have flown.I wonder how many men we are, after all.” In another letter he wrote,“I have scribbled verse ever since I left home—or rather it has scribbled itself—as if my imagination was kicking up its heels like a colt for joy at my holiday.”4 It was not fame exactly that he was chasing, although he certainly enjoyed that. But even more than seeking fame,he was finally able to indulge his passion for creative writing. Officially, he referred to writing literature as summer play, but the evidence belies such statements.This is especially true in terms of the amount of time he spent drafting and revising,and,perhaps more telling,the disappointment he felt at not succeeding fully. Often his novels were two or three years in the making.And in the case of at least five (Roland Blake,Hugh Wynne,Constance Trescot,The Red City,and John Sherwood),he paid to have the entire novel privately printed before publication. He felt that he could revise a novel best in print, and he called these copies “trial prints.” There is another exception to Mitchell’s typical characterization of...

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