S. Weir Mitchell, 1829–1914: Philadelphia’s Literary Physician by Nancy Cervetti (review)

Nancy Cervetti’s erudite, yet readable, biography of Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) is likely to remain the standard account for some time to come. Cervetti masterfully situates her subject within three disciplinary traditions—the history of medicine, women’s history, and literary studies—complicating our understandings of a man whom some know as the brilliant founder of modern physiology and neurology and others identify as the misogynistic inventor of the rest cure. Cervetti offers new insights into these two sides of Mitchell, while also introducing readers to Mitchell as a man of letters. In the 1880s, after his international reputation as a medical researcher and clinician was secured, Mitchell began publishing novels, short stories, and poems. His contemporaries knew Mitchell had a remarkably versatile mind and an energetic personality, and what resulted, Cervetti argues, was an incredibly successful life.

To narrate such a complicated and rich life requires a biographer of equal versatility and energy, and Cervetti is up to the task. The great virtue of this book lies in its ability to generate sympathy for this complex and ambitious man—without overstating Mitchell’s achievements or allowing his flaws to diminish them. Cervetti carefully explains medical practices that today we find repugnant, illuminating, for example, the heated debates over subjecting animals to painful research and the removal of women’s ovaries to treat nervous diseases, as well as showing how Mitchell’s experience treating Civil War soldiers influenced his treatment of hysteria in women a decade later.

The biography opens with a description of Mitchell at the height of his social influence and professional authority: “Urbane, handsome, and smartly dressed, Silas Weir Mitchell attracted attention whenever he walked into a room. Tall and slender with a Van Dyke beard and blue eyes, he was impossible to ignore.” Readers also get a sense of Mitchell’s hubris when the author explains that “apart from his father, he looked up to no living person” (1). Cervetti then offers an account of Weir’s rambunctious and unfocused childhood, characterizing Mitchell, the third of nine children, as a shy and insecure second son who disliked church and did poorly in school.

Although Cervetti emphasizes Mitchell’s remarkable transformation in overcoming an unexceptional childhood to ascend to the height of Philadelphian society, it would also be true to say that Weir Mitchell was to the manor born. His father, John, was the perfect role model, if not mentor. A preeminent physician and medical researcher himself, who held a prestigious academic appointment at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (which Weir attended), John brought Weir as a child to his lectures and chemistry laboratory, as well as to the Fifth Street library, where Weir was allowed to check out books. John was a southerner by birth and sensibility and entertained frequently, inviting to his home leading politicians and literary figures such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Francis Scott Key, and Edgar Allan Poe. His son would continue in this vein, establishing close friendships with his own host of scientific and literary figures and intellectual luminaries, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., William A. Hammond, William Dean Howells, Andrew Carnegie, and Phillips Brooks.

The book draws on Mitchell’s voluminous writings—his published scientific and literary output as well as his personal letters—to reveal Mitchell’s personal feelings toward various family members, his thoughts about smart women to whom he was both attracted and repelled, and his close friendships with men. An excellent chapter on his ambivalent feelings about the Civil War shows how Mitchell profited from the war when he ran a 400-bed hospital in which he treated soldiers suffering from “causalgia”—burning pain—and “phantom limbs,” terms that Mitchell coined to describe the neurological injuries he encountered (75–76). The Civil War was the most professionally productive and emotionally painful period of Mitchell’s life—painful because he was witness to thousands of men’s torturous sufferings and...