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1. Case Study: Of Phantom Nations
- University of Massachusetts Press
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[ 1 ] Case Study Of Phantom Nations 1 Long, too long America, Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn’d from joys and prosperity only, But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not, And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are, (For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?) Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps A man is not his brain, or any one part of it, but all of his economy, and [. . .] to lose any part must lessen this sense of his own existence. S. Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” In 1866, after his Civil War service as a surgeon at Turner’s Lane Hospital in Philadelphia, the neurologist and novelist S. Weir Mitchell published his first work of fiction in the Atlantic Monthly. This short story, “The Case of George Dedlow,” is generally credited today as the first description in print of the strange neurological phenomenon commonly known as “phantom limb”—an amputee’s sensation that a missing limb is still present. Its protagonist, a triple amputee, passes his time in hospital by interviewing patients like himself: I found that the great mass of men who had undergone amputations for many months felt the usual consciousness that they still had the lost limb. It itched or pained, or was cramped, but never felt hot or [ 2 ] CHAPTER ONE cold. If they had painful sensations referred to it, the conviction of its existence continued unaltered for long periods; but where no pain was felt in it, then by degrees the sense of having that limb faded away entirely. I think we may to some extent explain this. It should surprise no one when a fictional character, himself a physician as well as a patient, continues to act like a doctor. It is more unusual, perhaps, for a doctor to resort to fiction as a means of furthering science. As it turned out, Weir Mitchell’s story was so convincing that the hospital named in the piece received actual donations in the name of his protagonist , George Dedlow. Those who doubt the power of war stories need look no further than Weir Mitchell, the patron saint of science in fiction. This chapter examines a different, even stranger case, and argues for the power of fiction as reparation rather than research. To do so, we follow the peregrinations of a personal friend of S. Weir Mitchell: one of our greatest poets, Walt Whitman. In a rather neat reversal, our study of this man of letters focuses on his life during the war, when Whitman spent most of his hours working as a volunteer nurse. In December of 1862, the poet traveled, first to Washington and then to the Union camps near Fredericksburg, following a report in the New York papers that his brother George had been wounded. Although George Washington Whitman had only suffered a minor injury, and would go on to survive more than twenty battles throughout the war, this single episode would change his older brother’s life forever. In part, the poet reacted to the industrialized brutality of modern war; Whitman’s account of this trip mentions as his first sight “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart” (712). What Whitman did at the front, however, responded directly to what he saw there. In the Union camp, the poet spent his time visiting other injured soldiers as well as his brother. After his return to Washington, he continued do so, for years in fact, finding in the role of hospital aide and bedside companion a vocation as compelling as any he ever had, including that of poetry. “I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them,” he wrote. “Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it” (713). [107.21.176.63] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:29 GMT) [ 3 ] CASE STUDY: OF PHANTOM NATIONS Whitman, in describing this calling, compared himself explicitly to the apostle Paul, blinded by divine light on the road to Damascus: “Every man has a religion . . . something which absorbs him, possesses itself of him, makes him over in its image . . . That...