Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/824

NAME MITCHELL 802 MITCHELL ed to lecture on chemistry applied to the arts, in the Franklin Institute. In the spring of 1841 he was called to the chair of theory and practice in the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, and at different times was visit- ing physician to the Pennsylvania hospital and to the city hospital. The city rewarded him for his services in times of pestilence on two occasions by gifts. He wrote on mesmerism, the osmosis and liquefaction of carbonic acid gas, and the ligature of limbs in spastic con- ditions, and was the first to describe the spinal arthropathies (1831). Besides a volume of poetry entitled "Indecision, and Other Poems," Philadelphia, 1839, and popular lectures on scientific subjects translated into other languages, he left on essay "On the Crypto- gamous Origin of Malarious and Epidemical Fevers," 1849, which was the first brief for the parasitic etiology of disease on a priori grounds — a vigorous, logical argument which, as pure theory goes, ranks with Henle's essay on miasms and contagia (1820). A collection of essays, including a paper on animal magnetism, was published in Philadelphia in 1859, by his distinguished son. Amer. Encvclopaedia, Appleton, 1866. Hist, of Med., F'. H. Garrison, 2nd Edit., 1917. Mitchell, Silas Weir (1829-1914) Silas Weir Mitchell was born in Philadelphia, February 16, 1829, and died there of pneu- monia January 4, 1914. Dr. Mitchell's international reputation was based upon his original contributions to medi- cine and physiology, and upon his produc- tions as a poet and a novelist. While pre- eminent as a practitioner of medicine, he also held throughout his long life the highest rank as a medical writer and investigator; his novels and his poetry, mostly published after his fiftieth year, established his position in Amer- ican literature. His ancestors on his father's side were Scotch ; his mother's family came from central England. His father was Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell (q. v.), and Dr. John Kearsley (q. v.), a noted colonial physician was an ancestor. After a desultory preparatory education Mitchell was admitted to the college depart- ment of the University of Pennsylvania in the class graduating in 1848; he left because of ill health a year before graduation. In 1903 he was restored by Council to full mem- bership in his class. He graduated in medi- cine at the Jefferson Medical College in 1850, and spent one year (1851-52) in Paris, where he came in contact with Claude Bernard, the physiologist, who greatly influenced his future course. He was neither an ardent, nor a methodical student, but worked as he felt in- clined. He married, September 30, 1858, Mary Mid- dleton Elwyn, only daughter of Dr. Alfred Elwyn ; two children were born, Langdon Elwyn Mitchell, author and playwright, and Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, second, practi- tioner, teacher and writer, an assistant to his father and having his residence in Philadelphia. Mitchell's first wife died in 1862, and June 23, 1875, he married Mary Cadwalder, who died January IS, 1914, surviving him less than two weeks ; to her helpfulness and inspiration he owed much. One daughter born by this marriage died in early womanhood. Weir Mitchell was pre-eminently a family man who loved nothing better than to gather around him in his home a group of intellectual kindred spirits. While Mitchell by his writings was a great teacher, he never held long any academic position ; when elected professor in the med- ical department of the University of Penn- sylvania, he immediately declined. At the Orthopedic Hospital and Infirmary for Nervous Diseases he for many years gave conversational clinics for the benefit of the hospital staff and for such undergraduates and physicians as might attend, and many availed themselves of the opportunity. A few years after the establishment of the Phila- delphia Polyclinic and College for Graduates in Medicine he accepted a professorship in this institution, and opened to its students the opportunities afforded by his clinics at the Infirmary for Nervous Diseases. He was a trustee of the University of Penn- sylvania for thirty-five years, and to him is largely due the school of biology, as well as important help in the building of the medical laboratories and in securing endowments for the school of hygiene, and for the hospital of the university. He was a fellow and a president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; a mem- ber of the National Academy of Science; fel- low of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom ; honorary corresponding member of the French Academy of Medicine, of the Academy of Sciences of Bologna, and of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Nervenarzte; associate member of the Royal Medical So- ciety of Norway, of the Academy of Sciences of Sweden, of the Royal Academy of Medi-