S. Weir Mitchell, M.D., LL.D / [Guy Hinsdale].

  • Hinsdale, Guy.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: S. Weir Mitchell, M.D., LL.D / [Guy Hinsdale]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    S. WEIR MITCHELL, M.D., LL.D. BY GUY HINSDALE, A.M., M.D., Assistant Physician to the Infirmary for Nervous Diseases. Dr. Weir Mitchell’s career as an army surgeon is one of the most interesting chapters in the record of an eventful life. In May, 1863, Dr. William A. Hammond, who was then Surgeon- General of the United States Army, on the request of Dr. Mitchell, ordered Dr. Mitchell and Dr. George P. Morehouse to take charge of a hospital for soldiers suffering from nervous diseases. At first the patients belonging to this class were assigned to separate wards in the hospital on Christian Street between Minth and Tenth Streets' in Philadelphia. The scope of the hospital was soon enlarged so as to include patients suffering from injuries of the nerves. This hospital becoming insufficient, a new hospital, with a capacity of four hundred beds, was created in Turner’s Lane, corresponding to what is now nineteenth Street and Columbia Avenue, Philadel¬ phia. Surgeons Charles H. Alden, U.S.A., and William W. Keen, U.S.A., were put in charge, and the Surgeon-General wisely left the surgeons free to devote their entire time to the treatment of patients, relieving them of most of the administrative duties usually connected with army hospitals. Dr. Hammond, when he left office, had established special wards or hospitals for diseases of the eye, for syphilis, for stumps, for diseases of the heart and lungs, and in this way vastly promoted the interests of the wounded and sick soldier, as well as those of science. The Turner’s Lane hospital received a multitude of cases repre¬ senting almost every conceivable type of obscure nervous disease. The medical inspectors forwarded from various fields and hospitals
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