Mitchell, Silas Weir (1829–1914)

US physician, writer, and poet. A pioneer in advocating the ‘rest cure’ and other psychological approaches to nervous conditions, and he made the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital into a major center for treating nervous disorders.

Born in Philadelphia, he received his MD from Jefferson Medical College, continued his medical studies in France, and then returned to Philadelphia to practice. During the Civil War, he served as a surgeon for the Union army and collaborated on an important work, Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves (1864). In the ensuing decades he specialized in neurology and wrote some 120 articles in that field, but he also did work in toxicology, physiology, and pharmacology. Meanwhile, he had been writing fiction and poetry since the end of the Civil War; his first published story, The Case of George Dedlow (1866), was notable for conveying the mental state of a soldier about to enter combat. His collected works would eventually add up to 16 volumes, including once widely read novels such as Roland Blake (1886) and Hugh Wayne, Free Quaker (1897), greatly admired for their psychological insights.