Philadelphia's Literary Physician

A biography of Philadelphia physician S. Weir Mitchell. Examines his life and his interactions with many prominent nineteenth-century Americans, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jane Addams, Winifred Howells, Edith Wharton, William Osler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, Walt Whitman, and Andrew Carnegie.

This modern biography provides a comprehensive and balanced view of a legendary figure in American medicine. Controversial because of his fierce fight against women’s rights, S. Weir Mitchell achieved stunning success through his experimentation with venomous snakes, treatment of Civil War soldiers with phantom limbs and burning pain, and creation of the rest cure to treat hysteria and neurasthenia. Mitchell’s life was extraordinary—interesting in its own right and as a case study in the larger inquiry into nineteenth-century medicine and culture.