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1. Family Matters
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For Weir Mitchell, a career in medicine was “the most entirely satisfactory of earthly pursuits” and the most honorable of all professions. He felt “ancestral pride in the splendor of its conquests, the courage and heroism of its myriad dead.”1 His great-grandparents in Scotland, John Mitchell and Agnes Tait, had eight children,and all five sons studied medicine.Mitchell felt especially proud that medicine had been in his family for three generations, and this was one of the reasons why he wanted his life’s story to begin in Scotland.Venerating medicine ’s history and traditions,Mitchell spent a small fortune collecting old medical books and portraits of famous physicians. One of his most cherished gifts was a reproduction of William Harvey’s Padua diploma, and it kept “noble company” in his study with Edward Jenner’s inkstand.2 Born in 1766, Mitchell’s grandfather Alexander was a “rosy blue-eyed man of great personal strength, rather reserved and with a certain gravity of manner .”3 He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and then immigrated to America. In Shepherdstown,Virginia, he met and married Elizabeth Kearsley. Also Scotch Presbyterian, her family had immigrated to America in 1717.Mitchell’s father, John Kearsley,was born in Shepherdstown in 1793.Shortly after his birth,his mother became seriously ill and died four years later.Alexander remarried Ann Scott, and she gave birth to a son. When Alexander died in 1804, his brother in Scotland offered to take charge of John. At the age of eleven, Mitchell’s father sailed for Leith. At the ancient Academy of Ayr, John studied Greek,Latin,French,geography, bookkeeping,philosophy,and mathematics.He won silver medals and certificates for scholarly achievement,battled with the town boys,and roamed the Ayrshire 1 family matters e 01 Chapter 1_Cervetti 6/27/2012 1:54 PM Page 6 countryside. At the age of seventeen, with a letter of introduction written by the academy’s director, he left Ayr for the University of Edinburgh, where as a pleasant “strong handsome lad” and the only American, he became a social favorite.It was around this time that James Hogg taught Mitchell’s father many of the quaint Scottish songs he would later sing to his family in America.Mitchell wrote that even as a much older man, his father “could recite the whole of ‘Tam o’Shanter,’when of an evening his hot Scotch was brewed and we heard him recite or listened to him sing in his well-preserved tenor ‘Burnie Boozle’ or ‘Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon.’ I remember that his singing of ‘The Flowers of the Forest are a’ Rede Awa’ used to move some of us children to tears.”When the poet Robert Burns died in 1796, John and his uncle’s family mourned his death.Mitchell’s great-grandfather was collector of excise at Dumfries , and Burns had been on his staff. Burns visited the Mitchell home and wrote the elder Mitchell several letters, including one in the form of a poem requesting money. Mitchell felt that the story of his Scottish ancestry was worth telling if only for this connection with Burns.4 In 1814, the year of Napoleon’s abdication and the end of the War of 1812, John Mitchell returned to the United States only to discover that the British had destroyed his modest inheritance, including his father’s books and silver. With the assistance of his mother’s family in Virginia, he moved to Philadelphia and began to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and to work in the office of Dr.Nathaniel Chapman,a Virginian.During John’s medical education and after his graduation in 1819, he made at least two lucrative trips to China as a ship’s surgeon.On his first trip,he took along Samuel Johnson ’s Lives of the Poets and studied Milton and such cavalier and neoclassical poets as Waller, Cowley, Dryden, Addison, and Pope. He created a beautifully handwritten dictionary of quotations in three Chinese blank books,and in this way acquired an affectionate familiarity with British poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 After returning from the first voyage, John met Sarah Matilda Henry.Her father was an Irish Presbyterian and a wealthy manufacturer in Philadelphia. Since John possessed little except charm and good looks to recommend him, Alexander Henry opposed any talk of marriage and even went so far as to forbid...