Bodies in the Archive

Abstract

Off and on for fifteen years I traveled the country to research the life and work of the nineteenth-century physician S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell is best known as the creator of the rest cure to treat hysteria and neurasthenia, but his wide-ranging interests led him to explore many other areas of medicine and literature. His groundbreaking work with rattlesnake venom earned him an international reputation, and his work with gunshot wounds, burning pain, and phantom limbs during the U.S. Civil War won him the title of the “Father of American Neurology.” Mitchell also possessed an impressive facility with language, and . . .