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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.With perfect assurance, it was his way to size up and immediately take command of a situation. He was a risk taker and experimenter,and apart from his father,he looked up to no living person.One of the striking aspects of Mitchell’s story is the way he put aside the ennui of his childhood and the insecurity and recklessness of his youth to become a distinguished citizen of Philadelphia. He wrote that during his boyhood, all his family history was well-known to his father,“but he cared little for these matters and I, then, not at all.We were simply, as I take it, Scotch middle class, able folk and certainly of decent descent.”1 However,Weir Mitchell,as he preferred to be called, came to care a great deal about descent. Due to his groundbreaking animal experimentation in the 1850s, Mitchell is recognized as one of the first physiologists in the United States. His research into the effects of rattlesnake venom set the stage for subsequent work in toxicology and immunology.His creation of the rest cure to treat hysteria and neurasthenia originated in his treatment of Civil War soldiers who suffered from burning pain and phantom limbs,the latter a term he coined.The war work won him an international reputation and the title of “Father of American Neurology .” He wrote engaging and lucid prose and published myriad books and articles.In his fifties,after major achievements in physiology and neurology,he turned his attention to literature, writing short stories, novels, and poems. He also devoted substantial time to public service, especially as a member of the Board of Trustees at the University of Pennsylvania,a member of the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Institution,and a fellow of the College of Physicians introduction 00b Introduction_Cervetti 6/27/2012 1:53 PM Page 1 of Philadelphia for fifty-eight years and its president for two nonconsecutive terms. William Osler wrote that versatility was the striking feature of Mitchell’s mind,and William W.Keen said that he was the most original,yeasty,and stimulating medical man he had ever met.2 There can be no doubt regarding Mitchell ’s contributions, which make him a major figure in the history of medicine. His Renaissance range of interests provides a fascinating trip through the nineteenth century; his was a life in touch with the birth of physiology, the vivisection debates, Civil War medicine, the bizarre phenomena of hysteria, the birth of modern psychiatry, popular literature, and the privilege and indulgence of the Gilded Age. His correspondence provides an interior view of a generation that influenced social behavior and politics in the areas of medicine,education, literature, and philanthropy, and included friends like Oliver Wendell Holmes, William W. Hammond, William Osler, John Shaw Billings, William W. Keen, William Dean Howells, John Cadwalader, and Andrew Carnegie. I first encountered Weir Mitchell while studying Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and their personal experiences with the rest cure.The first time I went to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and examined the Mitchell Papers, I could see that while Mitchell admired writers like George Eliot and Edith Wharton and possessed a handful of female friends, overall he did not think highly of women. Instead, he used his charm, medical authority, and social prominence to confine them to caretaking. He was vehemently opposed to their education and careers, and unlike many of his contemporaries who felt the same way,he spoke openly about the“woman question.”Even after he came to know women like Mary Putnam Jacobi and M.Carey Thomas and saw that women could succeed brilliantly as doctors, educators, and administrators , he remained adamant in his views. Mitchell intended to excel at whatever he did, and his war against women was no exception. His obstinacy hurt lives and interfered with his effectiveness as a physician,and it has cast a shadow over his contributions in experimental medicine and neurology. A close look at Mitchell’s education and the trajectory of his multifaceted career reveals the accomplishments and the prejudice against women as a jarring counterpoint that is rarely acknowledged. Depending on the discipline, scholars tend to ignore one or the other. In the humanities, scholars often focus on his relationship with...

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