A recent commentary by Paul W. Armstrong and Robert C. Welsh opens with a quotation attributed to S. Weir Mitchell, who is identified as an American novelist.1
Mitchell was also one of the most prominent physicians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is recognized as one of the most important neurologists in American medicine. In the 1850s, Mitchell completed extensive experimentation in medical physiology, publishing 25 papers in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. During the Civil War years 1862 to 1864, Mitchell worked as a contract surgeon in the Union Army. Of the many publications resulting from his Civil War work, the 2 most important were Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves, published in 1864 with coauthors G.R. Morehouse and W.W. Keen, and Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences, a comprehensive work published in 1872. Gunshot Wounds immediately became the authoritative work on nerve injuries; it featured the first descriptions of phantom limb, ascending neuritis and causalgia (the “burning pain”) and discussed various treatment methods. As recently as 1965, the American Academy of Neurology reprinted Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences, referring to Mitchell as the “father of American neurology.”
Donald F. Weaver Department of Medicine (Neurology) Dalhousie University Halifax, NS
Reference
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