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 COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS 
 AND SURGEONS 
 
 Reference Library 
 
 Given by 
 
THE S. WEIE MITCHELL OEATION 
 
 S. WEIR MITCHELL 
 
 PHYSICIAN 
 MAN OF SCIENCE 
 MAN OF LETTERS 
 MAN OF AFFAIRS 
 
 BY 
 CHARLES W. BURR, M.D. 
 
 Delivered before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 
 November 19, 1919 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE COLLEGE 
 1920 
 
Digitized by tine Internet Archive 
 
 in 2010 with funding from 
 
 Open Knowledge Commons 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/sweirmitchellphyOOburr 
 
The Weir Mitchell Oration was established by the College of 
 Physicians of Philadelphia in an amendment to the Ordinances and 
 By-Laws adopted December 2, 1914: 
 
 "This triennial Oration shall have for its subject the life and work 
 of Weir Mitchell in their various aspects, or the relation of the phy- 
 sician to public life, or the physician in science and letters, or broad 
 considerations of psychiatry and neurology, or surgery and military 
 surgery in relation to morbid conditions and wounds and injuries of 
 the brain and nervous system, or of scientific research, or medical 
 books and libraries, or medical history and biography, and shall be, 
 so far as possible, of general as well as professional interest." 
 
S. WEIR MITCHELL 
 
 PHYSICIAN, MAN OF SCIENCE, MAN OF LETTERS, 
 MAN OF AFFAIRS. 
 
 Though the College founded the Weir Mitchell oration December 
 2, 1914, within a few days of five years ago, this is the first address 
 given under the terms of the resolution. The explanation of the 
 delay is simple. Though the United States for three long, dismal 
 years was held back from the performance of its duty by a timorous 
 administration, reeking with inefficiency, pretending to be satu- 
 rated with idealism, taking advice from idols of the parlor socialists, 
 flirting with real socialists, striving to lead the people away from 
 their strong and healthy belief in Americanism to the worship of 
 the false god Internationalism, and having at its head a President 
 who was slow to learn that worse things may come to a country 
 than war and that upholding national honor is nobler than main- 
 taining a disgraceful peace, individual Americans were doing their 
 duty; many Fellows of this College, many men from all parts of 
 the country, were already giving themselves up to the great task 
 in hand and, for that reason, a speaker could not be had. Men of 
 worth were doing, not talking, and even those of us, like myself. 
 
left at home had little time to think of the dead. The World War 
 is over, another has replaced it, has come partly in consequence 
 of it, and the cm'tain of futurity, ever retreating but never rising, 
 hides an unending succession of tomorrows. But whatever the 
 future may contain for us, we may safely, for a moment, forget 
 the present sickness of the world and go back to old habits, one of 
 the best of which is the study of the lives of the illustrious dead. 
 It was very properly decided that the first oration should be 
 devoted to a study of Weir Mitchell himself, and the College has 
 conferred upon me the honor of making it. I wish now, at the 
 beginning, to thank the Fellows for the opportunity they have 
 given me to speak concerning one of the two men who did more to 
 influence my intellectual life dm-ing my later adolescence than all 
 others. To Weir Mitchell and William Osier I owe a debt. These 
 two men opened for me, as for many others — ^rather they showed 
 us how to open for ourselves — ^the gate that bars the way to fruitful 
 study, ignorance of scientific method. They had sympathy with 
 our desire to learn how to satisfy intellectual curiosity. Above all, 
 they taught us the paramount necessity of intellectual honesty. 
 I can give no higher praise than this. I purpose to speak of 
 Mitchell as physician, man of science, man of letters, man of 
 affairs. I do not purpose, nor can it be done in the short time at 
 my disposal, to give a detailed biography of the man. Indeed, 
 biography, as a rule, is a sorry business, unless written by someone 
 who knows the real soul of the man, and then usually favoring 
 prejudice prevents clear seeing. I had no such close personal 
 relations with Weir Mitchell. I was too much his junior to write his 
 biography from my personal knowledge. Of his youth I know 
 little, mere shreds and patches of half-remembered stories, and for 
 this I am sorry, because early in adolescence there appear signs, 
 
 6 
 
marks and tokens, had we only the eyes to perceive them and the 
 knowledge to comprehend, from which we could prophesy with 
 certainty, barring disease and accident, the boy's whole mental 
 and moral future. The story of the boyhood of a man like Mitchell, 
 written by a real psychologist, a real student of behavior, would 
 be a valuable contribution to our slight knowledge of mental 
 development in the individual. A thousand such would be of incal- 
 culable value. As I have said, I know little of Mitchell's boyhood, 
 but when his autobiography is published, in his officially written 
 life, there will be revealed how it impressed him years after, when 
 he had attained middle life or early old age. Such impressions are 
 never accurate. A man sees his boyhood through a mist; it may 
 be roseate or somber-hued, but always it is there, the mist of 
 memory falsified. One thing is certain, he was not precocious, 
 but slowly and steadily grew to maturity, nor did he stop then, 
 but continued to grow through the later years. His intellectual 
 horizon continued to broaden after the period in which in most 
 men the mind is fixed, set, crystallized, brittle. This characteristic, 
 as well as endurance, which causes the mind to continue bright, 
 active, alert and willing and able to accept new ideas until a very 
 advanced age, is, I think, more common among men of affairs, 
 doers, than among pure thinkers. Many great statesmen have 
 lived long, most great poets die at an earlier age. Those whose 
 only ability is to talk do not, for some mysterious reason, as a rule, 
 attain great age. In that the gods are kind to us. Mitchell was 
 not one of those children who startle by their brilliancy and make 
 the wise old family doctor fear for the future, knowing full well 
 such brilliancy more often portends a mental smash-up and moral 
 degradation in adolescence than fruitful genius. That he was an 
 imaginative child there is no doubt. Let me tell a story that 
 
 7 
 
reveals it. \^^len about seven years old he told his mother he had 
 just seen a golden chariot with horses and trappings. She, not 
 realizing that he, like all imaginative children, had in very truth 
 seen a vision, seen by the physical eye the thing he dreamed of , 
 chided him for untruthfulness. He felt the injustice of the charge, 
 never forgot the incident, and years later, during his professional 
 life, many times warned parents to be careful, when their children 
 related such things, not to mistake richness of imagination for 
 poverty of the moral sense. 
 
 Mitchell was fortunate in heritage and environment, in nature 
 and nurture. The first is the more vital, because good inheritance 
 may, and often does — we see it daily — overcome the evil of bad 
 environment. He came of a high class, intellectual and scholarly 
 family. His father was not only a distinguished physician but a 
 man of science. He himself passed all his youth in an atmosphere 
 of books, and, as a boy, he had that best education, hearing his 
 elders converse on things worth talking of. He was, I am told, a 
 bookish boy and early showed a love for poetry. He belonged to 
 a generation in which it was the custom to read the Bible, and he 
 was unconsciously but profoundly influenced in his literary style, 
 years after, by the reading. Of course, today we have progressed 
 so far that reading the Bible, like reading history, reading anything 
 older than the twentieth century, is regarded as a waste of time. 
 Our problems, the moderns tell us, are all new; our world is new; 
 old times can teach us naught. But old proverbs continue true, and 
 if pride goeth before destruction, ignorance causeth destruction. 
 
 I suspect that environment had a large influence in leading 
 Mitchell into medicine. His father, being a physician, could help 
 him materially. He had lived all his life in a medical atmosphere, 
 and I am inclined to believe that had not these external things 
 
 8 
 
existed his inclination toward literature would have proved 
 stronger than that toward science and he would have been purely 
 a man of letters . The two have much in common. Art and science 
 are not as unlike as they seem: both require of their disciples 
 imagination; science demands also compelling curiosity to learn 
 causes. Literature is the study of the adventures of the human 
 soul; science the study of the adventures of the universe and the 
 why of things. At all events, whether it was the pull from within 
 or from without that controlled him, after ending his collegiate 
 studies at the University of Pennsylvania he entered Jefferson 
 Medical College and graduated in 1851. Early in his medical 
 career he showed he was being driven by influences within himself 
 toward scientific investigation. 
 
 His early professional life was not all beer and skittles; it was a 
 period of hard, grinding work and heavy responsibilities. Mr. 
 Talcott Williams tells us that, in the autobiography, it is recorded 
 "that in the ten years after he began the practice of medicine his 
 receipts in practice were only a thousand dollars, and in that year 
 he had suddenly thrown upon him the responsibility of caring 
 for his father's family and was approaching his own marriage." 
 But his nature asserted itself. He was not content to be merely 
 an every-day doctor, mechanically, routinely, without mental 
 interest, dealing out pills and potions. The scientific instinct 
 ruled him. In 1853 he was elected to membership in the Academy 
 of Natural Sciences, and two years later was placed upon the 
 Library Committee. In 1858 a biological section of the Academy 
 was instituted on the petition of Mitchell, Leidy, J. A. Meigs, 
 Hammond, Hays and others. At the first meeting Mitchell 
 presented the first paper on "Blood Crystals of the Sturgeon." 
 Years after, when the whole biological point of view of men of 
 
 9 
 
science had changed mightily, Mitchell's interest in the subject 
 came to the front again, and he furthered the great work of Reichert 
 on the crystallography of hemoglobin. He was one of the founders 
 of the Pathological Society of Philadelphia, the nursery of men 
 of science ever since, for there the young may, unhampered by 
 the aged, discuss the newest thing and prove it true or false. The 
 first meeting was in 1857, and again he presented the first paper. 
 From the time of his graduation until 1863, which was a turning- 
 point in his career, for then he assumed charge of an Army Hospital 
 for Nervous Diseases, he had written twenty-two scientific papers, 
 none of them being clinical, but all iu the domain of physiology, 
 pharmacology and toxicology. During a part of this time he was 
 lecturer upon physiology in the Philadelphia Association for 
 Medical Instruction, an organization for extramiu*al teaching. 
 He \\Tote on arrow and ordeal poison and on snake venom, was 
 the first to describe the chiasm between the laryngeal nerves in 
 turtles and observed the almost total immunity of pigeons against 
 opium. The most valuable contribution he made previous to his 
 war work was his monograph on the venom of the rattlesnake, 
 published in 1860 in the Smithsonian Contributions. In speaking 
 of it. Dr. William H. Welch said at the Mitchell memorial meeting, 
 held in this hall, that investigation of snake venom held Mitchell's 
 attention off and on for a half -century, one of the results, the first 
 demonstration by Mitchell and Reichert, in 1883, of the so-called 
 toxic albumins, to which class belong not only the snake venoms 
 but also certain plant, and especially bacterial poisons, being 
 epochal. He further said the later classical researches of Flexner 
 and Noguchi owed their inception to the inspiration and support 
 of INIitchell, aided by grants from the Carnegie Institution. 
 The Civil War gave Mitchell opportunity to study nervous 
 
 10 
 
diseases on a large scale, and he seized it. He, Moorehouse and 
 Keen studied in the military hospital many cases of all kinds of 
 injuries of nerves received in battle. The material was such as only 
 a great war can give, and he used it for the book. Gunshot Wounds 
 and Other Injuries of Nerves, published in 1864. The work brought 
 him scientific reputation, because it was a great book and solved 
 not a few problems in neurology; in fact, no really important new 
 clinical contribution to the s;^Tiiptomatology of disease of the 
 peripheral nervous system has been made by anyone since, though 
 much has been discovered concerning causation; our point of view 
 as to disease in general has greatly changed, and surgical advance 
 has tremendously improved treatment. 
 
 Among his minor discoveries were the cremasteric reflex and 
 the disease erythromelalgia. His work on the relation of eye- 
 strain to headache was of great practical value. In consequence 
 of it many a victim of headache, unable to work and suffering from 
 intense nervousness, has been relieved. A pair of spectacles has 
 even cured a family quarrel and reunited man and wife. Unfor- 
 tunately, as often happens, the medical faddist took up the matter 
 and claimed to cure all kinds of illnesses by putting on glasses. 
 Great harm followed. He studied the eye, not only in its therapeu- 
 tic relation, but also was among the first of the American physi- 
 cians to point out the great diagnostic importance of ophthalmo- 
 scopic examination in studying diseases of the brain. 
 
 His great popular reputation rested on the rest cm-e. In a little 
 book, entitled Fat and Blood, he taught that tired nerves, states of 
 nervous irritability, suspiciousness short of real delusions, terrible 
 haunting ideas which terrify the victims, can often be cured by 
 rest, isolation, massage, milk diet and the rest. He had the glim- 
 mering of an idea, which he could never prove, because chemistry 
 
 11 
 
was not far enough advanced, that milk does good in these patients 
 not only because it is easily digested, but because it in some way 
 alters the chemistry of the body. The future chemistry will prob- 
 ably prove the correctness of his guess. 
 
 There was at first much opposition among physicians to the rest 
 cure, especially from those whose temperament compels them 
 always to- be in opposition. We all know such people, by sad 
 personal acquaintance; they are the type whose mental reflex is 
 always "No," and who having once said the word, stubbornly 
 persist in their opposition. They are the men who, when St. 
 Peter meets them at the gates of Heaven on resurrection day, will 
 hesitate, so fixed is their habit of opposition, to accept his kindly 
 invitation to enter. Happily, no injury will be done, rather poetic 
 justice, for they deserve to go to the other place. Some physicians, 
 I fear envy influenced their subconscious minds, said it was unpro- 
 fessional for a physician to write in language the common people 
 could understand, because it was advertising himself, and he might 
 thereby obtain a patient, and to have patients is wicked, because 
 it means success. Others, horribly suspicious of the morality of 
 their fellows, claimed that massage was immoral. The treatment 
 finally, however, became too popular, and incompetent physicians 
 used it on patients who needed a work cure, not a rest cure. Never- 
 theless, it still has, and will continue to have, a very important and 
 useful place in therapeutics. It has brought back to healthy life 
 many a nerve-wracked, brain-weary invalid. 
 
 A literary friend, one whose business is book-writing, said, in 
 
 speaking to me about this address, "Of course you will only talk 
 
 about the medical side of Dr. Mitchell's life," his tone implying 
 
 that a mere medico was incompetent to speak on such a great 
 
 matter as literature. In a sense, my friend was right. It would 
 
 12 
 
be presumptuous for me, a man without technical training, to 
 pretend to be a serious critic of modes and methods, and to claim 
 to be competent to speak with authority. I disdain to indulge 
 in another kind of criticism, or investigation, though a certain 
 type of professor of literature, thinking he is very scientific and 
 being proud thereof, confines his attention to it. I mean the 
 man who, lacking the art sense, as some are born color-blind, 
 neglects the living soul of literature, dissects its dead body, its 
 mere material and studies its mechanism as a mechanic examines 
 a machine. This kind of man is illustrated by the teacher who 
 gave to one of his post-graduate students in English literature, 
 as the subject for her thesis, "The Adjectives of Color and Sound in 
 Shelley's Poetry." The dear, innocent seeker after a Doctor of 
 Philosophy degree, dug and dug and dug, and catalogued, and wore 
 out etymological dictionaries, and thought she was learning litera- 
 ture, but failed to see, so plainly was it before her, the very essence 
 of the thing. Very soon, instead of finishing her thesis, she became, 
 in consequence of her work, my patient; and after rest had cured 
 her fatigue, a course in real literature, and I prescribed it, helped 
 to make her a healthy woman, with an entirely different notion 
 about the study of literature. The professor lost a pupil and a 
 school for girls got a very good teacher, who is still without the 
 Ph.D. degree. I wish such professors could all be compelled to 
 sit at the feet of Quiller Couch, or else become professors of linguis- 
 tics, a perfectly proper and useful science, but having nothing to 
 do with literature. Again usurping the critic's seat, I had intended, 
 in spealdng of Mitchell's poetry, to say a few words about what is 
 called, in free translation from the French, free verse, but recent 
 events make me abstain, because I do not desire still further to 
 disturb the already much perturbed emotions of the ladies who are 
 
 13 
 
carrjing on the propaganda in its favor with a somewhat unneces- 
 sary violence of verbal and lachrymal effort. May I be permitted 
 to say, however, that some of us (Mitchell was of the number) 
 enjoy the other forms of poetry more. Mitchell did not use free 
 verse, but then he was a minor poet, a poet of occasion, and he 
 never rose to those great heights of passion or reached the arcanum 
 of philosophy which can only be written about in broken prose. 
 Seriously, poetic prose, with a cadence running through it, was not 
 discovered only the other day and wdll continue to be written for 
 a long while to come. But may we not ask the present-day leaders 
 among the "free versers" to teach the less distinguished practi- 
 tioners of the school to realize that thought is of some little value 
 in writing, that noise, even musical noise, is not all there is in 
 poetry. But, putting aside matters which only a few have a right 
 to speak about, there are other aspects than the technical from 
 which anyone who reads has a right to judge literature, to be a 
 critic, because, after all, men of letters exist to give pleasure to the 
 rest of us. They are our servants, not om* masters, and we have a 
 right to say whether we are pleased or displeased, and why: and 
 this is criticism. 
 
 We physicians are prone to boast about the number of our 
 fellows who have achieved fame in literature. Reall}', if we throw 
 out the men who studied medicine by accident and soon deserted 
 it, the number is surprisingly small. In America, Holmes, who 
 really ceased practice early, though he continued to teach anatomy, 
 and did it, I am told, charmingly but not ultrascientifically, and 
 jMitchell, who practised until the end, are the only two great 
 examples, though there have been many minor lights who got 
 much pleasure out of letters. The number of American physicians 
 possessing the genius for appreciation of literature is large; the 
 
 14 
 
number endowed with the genius of accomplishment small. This 
 is curiously interesting, for if the ability to write were an acquir- 
 able faculty, dependent upon favorable circumstances and mere 
 technical knowledge of people, the catalogue of men of letters 
 would be full of the names of physicians, for no other class has the 
 opportunity to see man in his nakedness, his strength and weakness, 
 his ability to endure to the end, his frailty from the beginning, 
 the play of motives in conduct and the variability of the moral 
 sense. Every chief and every assistant in every hospital sees 
 daily all the tragedy and not a little of the comedy of human 
 behavior, but few perceive. This is the great reason so few medical 
 men have attained high rank in literature. Furthermore, physi- 
 cians have an unsuspected handicap. Their very knowledge of 
 humanity, strange as it at first sight seems, limits them. Almost 
 inevitably, when writing, they hold a clinic on good souls or bad; 
 they cannot forget they are physicians; they are too painfully 
 accurate in detail; they are too learned. Too much technical 
 learniog is a bad thing in literature. Had Shakespeare been 
 learned in the schools he would not have been Shakespeare, but 
 Bacon or some other of the same ilk. Mitchell wrote, not because 
 his profession gave him large opportunity to study character, 
 but because he was born with the faculty to perceive and sympa- 
 thetically to understand, apart from professional knowledge, and 
 because he had the "urge" to accomplish. It is a great pity that 
 more American physicians do not have literary instinct, because, 
 even if they never wrote novels, drama or poetry, it would add to 
 the interest and hence the value of their professional writings, as 
 it did in Mitchell's case. All through the formative period of his 
 medical life his professional reading was confined to the writings 
 of English, the few Americans who were then writing, and French 
 
 15 
 
authors. Those men all believed that care in the use of words and 
 clarity of expression are important in science; that science should 
 be literature. Yesterday, as time counts in the lives of nations, 
 we drifted away from such beliefs; tomorrow we may drift back. 
 I fear, in any event, we will drift. I cannot hope we will knowingly 
 "wisely guide our course. The German men of science are largely 
 responsible for our fall. One of the evil effects of German influence 
 has been to make many of the younger Americans think a slovenly 
 style, bad grammar and carelessness in the use of words, prove 
 profundity of thought and a mind so active that it cannot be 
 orderly. 
 
 I know not whether as a child, he, like so many imaginative 
 children, wrote novels and plays to the astonishment of wondering 
 parents, who so often think a mere outburst means that out of 
 their loins has sprung a genius, only later to see the celestial fire 
 burn out and leave behind the dead ashes of a very ordinary mind. 
 I suspect he did, but in him the fire burnt on. When he felt the 
 first impulse to literature, I also do not know, but he relates the 
 following about his first work that brought pay. He says: "I 
 never can resist telling a story. While this subject" (a discussion 
 about amputation stumps) "was occupying my mind, a friend came 
 in one evening and in our talk said, 'How much of a man would 
 have to be lost in order that he should lose any portion of his sense 
 of individuality?' This odd remark haunted me, and after he left 
 I sat up most of the night manufacturing my first story. The Case 
 of George Dedlow, Related hy Himself. In this tale my man had 
 lost all four limbs. I left this tale in the hands of a delightful lady, 
 now long dead, the sister of Horace Howard Furness. Then I 
 forgot it. Dr. Furness, her father, much amused, sent it to Mr. 
 Hale, editor of the Atlantic Montldy. To my surprise, I received 
 
 16 
 
about three months afterward a proof and a welcome check for 
 $85, my first literary earning, and certainly not a contribution on 
 my part, because I had nothing to do with the disposal of the paper, 
 and had not authorized its being put into print. This story has 
 had a dreadful number of successors, the product of my lengthening 
 summer leisure. Some of them you may have read to your cost. 
 The unfortunate George Dedlow's sad account of himself proved so 
 convincing that people raised money to help him and visited the 
 stump hospital to see him. If I may judge it by one of its effects, 
 George Dedlow must have seemed very real. At the close of my 
 story, he — a limbless torso — is carried to a spiritualist meeting, 
 where the spirits call up his lost legs and he capers about for a 
 glorious minute. The spiritualist journals seized on this as a new 
 proof of the verity of their belief. Imagine that!" 
 
 He tells us somewhere that Oliver Wendell Holmes advised him 
 not to go seriously into literature until his professional position was 
 established, telling him if he did it would injure him as a physician, 
 because people would say he had lost interest in his medical work. 
 It is a curious fact that little-minded people are of fixed opinion 
 that no one can have mind enough to do more than one thing. It 
 is partly the result of unconscious envy and of the desire to deceive 
 themselves into believing that no one can have more abUity than 
 they possess. The result of Holmes's advice was that Mitchell's 
 first novel, Hephzibah Guinness, was not published until 1880. 
 He was then fifty years old. 
 
 The medical man, the neurologist, shows little in his novels, 
 save in the professional care, the clinical accuracy of description 
 of certain bad, really diseased characters. Constance Trescot 
 is the one in which most clearly the professional hand of the curer 
 of sick minds is evident. The others could have been written — 
 
 17 
 
I am speaking only of his novels — by a man not a physician. I 
 think his talent was for simple stories of common life rather than 
 for analyzing the deep complexities of humanity, and this not- 
 "uithstanding the fact that for many years he was busy constantly 
 in solving and trying to solve the most complex problems in the 
 lives of many people. In Hugh Wynne he reached high-water 
 mark. It is no common book, but a real romance, which holds the 
 attention of the young, and in the work of attempting to Ameri- 
 canize the Americans going on today, much good would result if 
 every boy of foreign parentage were given the book to read. 
 Every youth would read it with pleasure and get his profit uncon- 
 sciously. Such reading would teach true patriotism and would 
 overcome much of the unwise psychology and sociology imbibed 
 from the silly people who call themselves "the intellectuals." 
 After Uugh Wynne I like best When All the Woods Are Green and 
 The Adventures of Frangois. John Senvood, Iron Master, is a 
 remarkable book for any man to write when eighty-one years old. 
 
 Certain of his "WTitings are a connecting link between science and 
 literature. His literary instinct, quite as much as his scientific 
 curiosity, led him to be interested in a group of subjects which 
 are partly medical, but yet appeal to the romantic and poetic side 
 of man. Hence, his papers on double personality, sleep and the 
 strange things happening then, and the like. Such matters are 
 not yet really within the domain of systematized knowledge, 
 which is science, but appeal to the love of the mysterious within all 
 of us. 
 
 Why has no medical man of letters ever succeeded in depicting 
 the physician? None so far as I know has made a great attempt, 
 and the lesser efforts have been mere literary thumb-nail sketches. 
 I suppose the explanation is that no one can objectify his own class. 
 
 '18 
 
A physician trying to analyze physicians is Hke a man writing his 
 autobiography or painting his own picture looking in a mirror. 
 Prejudice makes him see what he wants to see. Mitchell regarded 
 George Eliot's "Dr. Lydgate" as the best-described physician in 
 modern English literature. I fear he was right. Why I say fear, 
 those of you who have read Middlemarch will understand, and if 
 any of you are so modern as not to have read it, I advise you to do 
 so at once. George Eliot's contemporaries came nowhere near her 
 in picturing the physician. Even the great master, Dickens, 
 many of whose characters have become types, known everywhere, 
 to describe different sorts of men, failed to picture the physician. 
 Nowhere on his great canvases, filled to the very edge with men 
 and women of so many kinds, does a physician occupy the fore- 
 ground. His doctors are either mere caricatures or silly, senti- 
 mental, goody-goody men. 
 
 Mitchell had the gift of writing poetry for occasions, and in those 
 poems his sense of real humor often appears. The man who can 
 hold the attention of the overfed at a banquet while reading verse 
 must be a real poet, and Mitchell was always able to do that. As 
 pure poetry, I suppose, the " Ode on a Lycian Tomb" is his highest 
 attainment. Personally, I like best to read his short descriptive 
 poems of outdoors, his descriptions of lakes and rivers, mountains, 
 storms and such primitive things. He loved outdoors, and wrote 
 lovingly. 
 
 I must pass over his plays, confessing incompetence to judge. 
 
 Weir Mitchell had in smaller degree, and with a smaller stage 
 to play on, smaller and fewer opportunities to act, the same zest 
 for doing useful things characteristic of Benjamin Franklin. His 
 most important public position was that of trustee of the Uni- 
 versity of Pennsylvania. He held the position for thirty-five years, 
 
 19 
 
and retired only when he had attained an age at which most men 
 have long before, not only become food for worms, but part of the 
 wind-blown and water-carried matter of the world. He had a 
 share in the wonderful new birth of the University of Pennsylvania, 
 carried on under the guidance of Dr. William Pepper. Though 
 he was most active in the committee on the medical school, he was 
 much interested in the work of all the departments. During his 
 later life he saw the development of that feeling of dissatisfaction 
 and unrest shown by teachers of a certain type and ending in the 
 organized movement throughout the country for what they called 
 the defence of freedom of academic teaching. Really no one in 
 America ever thought of restraining the professorial tongue, what- 
 ever might be its vaporings, but these misguided gentlemen were 
 determined to be martyrs and had a mental twist and very bad 
 manners. Mitchell did not take the movement very seriously: 
 indeed, did not take it seriously at all. So few people holding 
 responsible professorial positions, or, for that matter, minor 
 teaching positions, took it seriously, partly, doubtless, because of 
 the support it received from the parlor socialists and the sensational 
 newspapers, much impotent rage arose within the hearts of the 
 pedagogic knights fighting windmills of their own creation. The 
 world has had such serious things to think about, and such impor- 
 tant things to do in the last few years, and is so busy now saving 
 these gentlemen from being hanged at the lamp-post by the real 
 bolsheviks, that the movement has died a natural death and has 
 not even had the ceremony of a formal burial. I speak of it because 
 it was an incident, though a minor one, in the history of collegiate 
 education which came somewhat into Mitchell's life. 
 
 He was for many years the guiding spirit of the Orthopaedic 
 Hospital and Infirmary for Nervous Diseases. He found it a mere 
 
 20 
 
dispensary; he left it a large and useful hospital. He studied in his 
 clinics there patients who taught him much, and all his assistants, 
 who worked with him, had a rare opportunity to learn not only 
 medical facts but methods of clinical study: above all, how to 
 examine patients. He was always interested in physical therapy, 
 and several modes of treatment, such as massage, baths, the use 
 of electricity, were introduced to the American profession or 
 rescued from the charlatans by him while working there. Even at 
 death his influence did not cease, for, through a magnificent gift 
 from his long time and deeply devoted friends, Mr. and Mrs. 
 Walter G. Ladd, added to by contributions, large and small, from 
 people of all ranks in the financial scale, who loved him much and 
 who wished to show respect to his memory, the out-patient depart- 
 ment was given a well-equipped building of its own, separate and 
 apart from the main hospital building. 
 
 He was for years an active member of the Philadelphia Library 
 and was a revivifying influence. 
 
 He was the first president of the Franklin Inn, a little club where 
 men who love the humanities meet and talk, and used, in the wicked 
 pre-prohibition days, even to drink a little — not too much, just 
 enough. Originally it was intended for men who live by books, 
 authors, and their enemies, the publishers; but once in a while they, 
 by gross favoritism, let down the bars and admit to membership 
 mere book-lovers. 
 
 Mitchell did more for this College than any other man of his 
 day and generation. He was elected to fellowship in 1856, and only 
 one Fellow elected in the same year (Dr. J. Cheston Morris) sur- 
 vived him. He served as president from 1886 until 1889 and again 
 from 1892 until 1895. From the time of his election to fellowship 
 until his death his interest in this old society, with its traditions, 
 
 21 
 
its history, its wonderful library, one of the great medical libraries 
 of the world, its sometimes too great conservatism, never flagged. 
 His activity in increasing its usefulness was continuous. Through 
 his efforts, and at the beginning his alone, were we enabled to leave 
 the old barn at the corner of Thirteenth and Locust Streets and 
 build this magnificent building. The proposal met with great 
 opposition from a small group of timorous, fearsome and somewhat 
 obstinate, but well-intentioned fellows, whose sincerity made their 
 opposition the more difficult to overcome. Everywhere and always 
 there are good men who are temperamentally against all change, 
 all progress, all improvement, but I think dear old Philadelphians 
 are greater sinners in this respect than any other group of mortals 
 anywhere within reach of the sun's rays on this or any other planet. 
 The College contained several. They said such a mass of books 
 could not be moved, that Twenty-second Street could not be 
 reached conveniently, and that we would be bankrupted. When 
 Dr. Mitchell induced his friend Mr. Andrew Carnegie to give us a 
 very magnificent sum of money for building, they said hie was a 
 multimillionaire, therefore wicked, and that we would be copartners 
 in his sins if we accepted his tainted money Remember all this 
 happened at the time the foul-mouthed and vile-natured "muck- 
 rakers" were in the ascendant throughout the country and had led 
 honest and well-meaning but unintelligent people to have a false 
 viewpoint about good morals. Finally, however, Mitchell over- 
 came all opposition, and the result is a monument to his diplomacy, 
 his untiring industry and his farsightedness. 
 
 Mitchell was from the first interested in the movement for 
 instituting schools for training nurses. In his early medical life 
 religious sisters were the only women who knew anything about 
 nursing, and they, of course, had no systematic training. In most 
 
 22 
 
hospitals the work was done by orderlies, often drunken, or by 
 incompetent women. He had a large part in changing things and 
 starting schools for nurses, until now some of us fear that possibly 
 nurses may sometimes imagine they know more than doctors. 
 Indeed, patients sometimes quote to me the medical opinions of 
 nurses, but since, according to the new philosophy, no one is to 
 have authority on any matter, especially not the specially trained, 
 and no one is to be subordinate but everybody equal, this is to be 
 expected. 
 
 One of the most important public questions he was interested 
 in was animal experimentation. For years he fought to protect 
 mankind from the assaults of fanatics. Some years ago a move- 
 ment was started to protect animals from cruelty. It was an 
 admirable idea and received well-deserved sympathy and encour- 
 agement. But soon men and women of a certain twist of mind 
 came to regard animals as having rights equal if not superior to 
 men and women. Becoming obsessed with the idea that physicians 
 in general, and physiologists in particular, were by nature cruel, 
 they soon determined to stop all experiments on animals. I 
 should have stated first that sometime previous to this, very 
 rapid increase in interest in physiology had begun and that this 
 science depends fundamentally on animal experimentation. The 
 antivivisectionists, as they call themselves, would have none of it, 
 and becoming a well-organized and wealthy body have continued 
 a crusade to stop all use of animals in scientific study. In addi- 
 tion to the zoophilists, that large body of people, the intelligent 
 public, who use as their life proverb, " Where there is smoke there 
 must be fire," which though true in physics is not true in life, 
 accepted the untruthful statements of the crusaders and increased 
 the difiiculty of having things done wisely. Mitchell and other 
 
 23 
 
men tried reasoning with these people. It was shown that thou- 
 sands of children were snatched from death by the antitoxin treat- 
 ment of diphtheria, the discovery and development of which 
 depended wholly upon animal experiment. It was no use. The 
 reply was, the doctors were lying about the results, and some dis- 
 ciples of the cult even said that it is wrong to kill a dog or other 
 animal even if thereby human lives are saved. Veterinary physi- 
 ologists showed that animal experimentation saved the lives of 
 thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs. The reply was the same, 
 "It is wrong to experiment on animals." How long it will be 
 before the matter is settled no man knowS; but fanaticism never 
 finally wins. Historians of the distant future, however, when man 
 has become a reasoning animal, will read with interest tinged with 
 pity the emotional statements of the zoophilists. Meanwhile, 
 knowledge is delayed and mankind and animalkind alike suffer. 
 There is hope that the tremendous good resulting from animal 
 experimentation, as shown by the medical experience of the war 
 just over, the young lives saved, the agonies of pain escaped, 
 may so influence public opinion that eccentric people will have 
 little influence on politicians, most of whom have had sons or 
 brothers or themselves have been in the war. They have seen and 
 have lived the realities of life. They will act accordingly. 
 
 He was a director of the Real Estate Trust Company, and when 
 through the dishonesty of a trusted official that institution came 
 to wreck, he, as was natural, acted the gentleman's part according 
 to the gentleman's code. 
 
 Dr. Mitchell's industry was prodigious. Think of the variety 
 of his vocations and avocations! His practice was very large, and 
 one requiring not only much thought but also much diplomacy. 
 Prescribing medicine was the smaller and, of course, the easier 
 
 24 
 
part. Teaching people how to live was the more important, 
 required more skill and was the more difficult, because many- 
 patients want physicians to give them a physic which will, in some 
 mysterious way, enable them to break nature's laws without 
 pajdng nature's debt, not realizing nature is an inexorable task- 
 mistress. It is true that for many years before his death he took 
 long holidays from professional work, but earlier there was a long 
 stretch of years when holidays were few and short. Physicians 
 consider themselves very busy and very unusual if they do only 
 this one thing — acquire a large and lucrative practice. But in his 
 life it was only a part. In addition to private practice he, through- 
 out his life, was a hospital physician. To him, as to every wise 
 physician, the hospital was a post-graduate school, where he was 
 always taking new courses. He spent a great deal of time in the 
 work of the numerous public bodies he was a member of. Hours 
 that most men spend in pure idleness or in silly kinds of amuse- 
 ment, he passed in scientific or other work. Time left over in this 
 busy life he gave to literature, his works numbering upward of 
 twenty-five titles, of which fifteen were longer or shorter novels. 
 There are many whose sole business is literature, the sum of whose 
 work is not larger. Finally, with all this work, he found time to 
 play, to get out in the woods and fish, in a real way commune with 
 nature, and to enjoy the society of men and women. Indeed, he 
 found a great deal of time for social life, for he was instinctively 
 a social animal and very gregarious. He was not one of those 
 silent, brooding thinkers who live alone and within themselves, and 
 then give to a surprised world their work, but a man requiring 
 human companionship. 
 
 One secret of his having accomplished so much was very simple. 
 He early learned the lesson that the mind is best rested not by doing 
 
 25 
 
nothing but by changing its occupation. Of course, everyone 
 cannot take this prescription, for there are many whose minds are 
 so Httle that the}' cannot find a multitude of interests, and hence 
 can only rest by idleness; but many have large areas of mind, 
 unknowTi to themselves, which could be worked productively if 
 only a chance were given. Few men, even among those to whom 
 nature has given the best mental machine, work unintermittently 
 to full capacity. Some geniuses are able to do creative work only 
 in irregularly recurring periods, the rest of the time doing nothing. 
 We little people are all prone to follow the law of the labor union 
 in mental work and only do as much, usually it is as little, as we 
 must. 
 
 Destiny prevented Dr. Mitchell from becoming a teacher. This 
 was a misfortune, not to him, but to the young men who studied 
 medicine in Philadelphia during his working life, because it so 
 greatly restricted his opportunity for personally influencing 
 younger men. No man was kinder to young men whom he thought 
 worthy of kindness. He was a mental stimulant to every young 
 man of intelligent ambition with whom he came in contact. He 
 awakened intellectual industry, encom-aged ambition and was 
 helpful in all the ways that youth needs help. Now, as things 
 were, the only young medical men who met him were his own 
 assistants and the young instructors in the medical school. Had 
 he been a teacher, and hence thro^vn -v^nth hundreds of young men, 
 the lives of many would have been altered, not only for their ovm 
 good, but for the betterment of the world. 
 
 Mitchell belonged to the mid-Victorian period, much abused 
 today by the disciples of the new philosophy, by the people who 
 think the world has changed, and who flatter themselves that they 
 have had a large influence in making the leopard change its spots. 
 
 26 
 
They may have whitewashed it : some of us think they are black- 
 washing it, but hope the first storm, the storm about to burst upon 
 us now, will clean the wash off. His racial inheritance was British: 
 his intellectual environment Victorian. He was influenced in 
 literature by Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in some degree by 
 Browning, by Scott and Thackeray and Dickens; in science by 
 Darwin and the rationalistic naturalists; in medicine by that great 
 group of English and French physicians who founded modern 
 clinical medicine, who laid such stress on morbid anatomy and 
 who founded rational therapeutics. Classical literature and thought 
 played little part in his development. 
 
 He had all the terrible vices of the Victorians, those monstrous 
 qualities that make the "uplifter," himself going, with a speed he 
 knows not of, straight to the world's waste-basket of discarded 
 notions, whine with impotent rage whenever he hears them spoken 
 of. He did not believe in the racial and mental equality of men. 
 He did not believe that all men can take education. He believed 
 in democracy, the democracy of our fathers, whose wisdom founded 
 representative government, but not in the rule of Demos. He dis- 
 trusted Demos for its lack of intelligence, its emotionalism, its 
 childish trust in every loud-mouthed political mountebank who 
 pays himself high wages in good coin, and his follower, in promises 
 bright as the rainbow and as unsubstantial; and because of its 
 blood-lust, when its passions are aroused by those who call them- 
 selves the people's friends. He believed in government by law and 
 not by men, by duly elected assemblies and not by momentary 
 noisy heroes. He did not often talk on things political, but I 
 remember well his deep, but quietly expressed, emotion, when that 
 chief of wordmongers, W. J. Bryan, ran for President: he who 
 afterward, for our sins, was visited upon us as Secretary of State 
 
 27 
 
and settled affairs of great pith and moment in his intervals of 
 leisure from his more serious work of appearing on the Chautauqua 
 circuit between the yodlers and the fiddlers. 
 
 He was fond of the forms and ceremonies of social life. It was 
 he, for example, who was primarily responsible for the use of these 
 not very comfortable gowns inflicted on the officers at the meetings 
 of this society. He even believed that young people should say 
 "Sir" to their elders, and I must confess, to my shame be it spoken, 
 that when I was a man in middle life I called him "Sir" spon- 
 taneously, unconsciously, reflexly. But then my reflexes were 
 firmly fixed before the new freedom was thought of ; when we poor 
 slaves, unconscious of our slavery, were taught, and believed the 
 lesson, that he most respects himself who respects others. 
 
 He, like so many of the Victorians, indeed we find the quality 
 rather common in all ages, realized his own worth and was very 
 proud of it. Indeed, the little-minded dwellers in a one dimen- 
 sional universe, those little souls who pass their lives within an 
 intellectual world encompassed by the boundaries of a point and 
 have no conception of a larger world without, leading their selfish, 
 useless lives and denying the existence of a great outside world, 
 inhabited by larger minds, accused him, when they could find no 
 other fault, with vanity. In truth he was vain. I will go further, 
 he was very vain. But it was a vanity that injured no man, in no 
 way lessened his acts of kindness to others, in no way limited his 
 good works. If the mental monads, his critics, had done one- 
 tenth his work we would have forgiven them ten times his vanity. 
 
 A story told relates how another man had to confess sharing 
 possession of this vice when speaking of Mitchell's vanity. Mr. 
 Carnegie and Professor Blank were paying Mitchell a visit. 
 Mitchell had been talking about himself, and when he left the 
 
 28 
 
room for a minute Mr. Carnegie said, " He's got a pretty good 
 opinion of himself." Whereupon the other, with a quizzing look 
 and speaking slowly, said, "Do not you think that most men who 
 do things think well of themselves?" Then Carnegie, after a 
 moment, "Yes, I guess we do. Anyhow it is a human failing." 
 It is the most human failing, and not to be counted against men 
 who do things, but only against those who do naught in life but 
 hunt for faults in their betters. 
 
 A story that Sir William, then Dr. Osier, told at the great 
 banquet in New York given in his honor just before he left this 
 country to go to Oxford, illustrates the importance of things 
 social, of knowledge of how to behave, from the point of view of a 
 Victorian. "Now," said Osier, "the authorities of the University 
 of Pennsylvania, when they were considering my name for the 
 professorship of clinical medicine, were easily able to find out 
 about my intelligence, my learning and such things. But they, 
 being wise men, wanted to know what manner of man I was: 
 was I 'to the manner born?' They solved it thus. Dr. Mitchell 
 gave me a luncheon. For dessert there was cherry pie, and, 
 remember this, for it is the point, the pie contained the stones. 
 The question was : Did I know what to do with the stones? I did." 
 Ladies and gentlemen, the examination was more important than 
 shows on the face of it. 
 
 The importance of manners from the point of view of the Vic- 
 torians is well illustrated in an incident in my own life in which 
 Mitchell had a part. When I was a very young man, he sent me 
 one day to examine a patient for him. I, being modest, bashful, 
 shy, was rather overawed when he told me that the patient was a 
 very important old lady, rather irascible, very formal, and that I 
 must remember my manners and make a good impression, because 
 
 29 
 
if I did she could and would be of great professional assistance to 
 me; whereas if I offended her, she would forever use her tongue to 
 my injury. After this sermon I was pretty well scared and 
 approached her trembling within, blushing without, and with 
 stammering speech. Her greeting was not cordial. At first I 
 thought she was vexed that having sent for the great man his 
 jackal had come. Soon I felt it was more personal than that, 
 that it was something in me had annoyed her. I went home crest- 
 fallen and sad. Next day, when I reported to Dr. Mitchell, be met 
 me with the glimmer of a smile, and handing me a letter said, 
 "Burr, read that." It ran: "Dear Silas! Never send that young 
 man, reeking with tobacco smoke, to see me again." I stopped 
 daytime smoking. The incident had a real Sunday-school-story 
 ending. A year later I met the old lady socially and told her what 
 a good turn she had done me. We became friends and she blew 
 my horn until her death. 
 
 He did not believe that the man behind the gun is of any im- 
 portance compared with the man who plans the gun. He believed 
 in personalities and was himself a personality. He, being old- 
 fashioned, did not believe in the identity of the sexes, and so far 
 from believing in their equality, failed completely to comprehend 
 how, under the mathematics of the new psychology, unlike things 
 can be measured by the same units. This, of course, is a trifling 
 detail we have gotten rid of by the simple process of putting it to 
 one side. His opinion on the woman question is shown in the 
 following quotation: 
 
 ' 'What I shall have to say in these pages will trench but little 
 on the mooted ground of the differences between men and women. 
 I take women as they are to my experience. For me the grave 
 significance of sexual difference controls the whole question, and, 
 
 30 
 
if I say little of it in words, I cannot exclude it from my thought 
 of them and their difficulties. The woman's desire to be on a 
 level of competition with man and to assume his duties is, I am 
 sure, making mischief, for it is my belief that no length of genera- 
 tions of change in her education and modes of activity will ever 
 really alter characteristics. She is physiologically other than the 
 man. I am concerned with her now as she is, only desiring to help 
 her in my small way to be in wiser and more healthful fashion 
 what I believe her Maker meant her to be, and to teach her how 
 not to be that with which physiological construction and the 
 strong ordeals of her sexual life threaten her as no contingencies 
 of man's career threaten in like measure or like number the feeblest 
 of the masculine sex." This is science, wisdom and, of course, 
 therefore, truth. 
 
 Mitchell never retired from active life. He was spared that 
 long period of partial physical death which sometimes precedes 
 mental death: he was spared the very much more horrible and dis- 
 tressing thing that is the fate of many men, a long prodromal time 
 of mental decay preceding the last blow of all which gives a tardy 
 release from living. He endured to the end: his final illness was 
 short. He almost had the thing all men should pray for, instead 
 of praying to be spared from, a sudden death. The words he used 
 in his address at the Centennial Celebration of this College in 1887 
 are appropriate to himself. He said: "As earnestly as our first 
 President, I pray with him that all who sit around me, and all 
 who are to come, do publicly and privately serve their generation." 
 He, with great ability leading to great results, served his gen- 
 eration. 
 
 31 
 
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