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It is indeed fitting that this well-constructed, judicial, and gracefully phrased biography should be produced by the University Press in Philadelphia, the city where Weir Mitchell was born, where he lived a long life, and where he fitted so well into the intellectual and social milieu. He was one of the ablest of American physicians, and one of the most attractive. It is time we were reminded of Dr. Mitchell, and that his works, his leadership, his character, and even his antagonisms should be appraised. The biographer, who is head of the English Department at Temple University, writes in a style that is both sound and readable. This is by no means his first biographical work, and we may hope it is not his last.
Silas Weir Mitchell was a frail boy in a vigorous family. He was imaginative and loved to read, with some interest in sport but not able to do as much as his brothers. At sixteen he spat blood and was told to spend much time out of doors. This gave him opportunity to observe nature with particular care, and his later writings contain many finely appreciative passages describing what he saw. He inherited his share of the Mitchell family energy, demonstrated in the very busy life he led, but hunting and fishing took the place of competitive sports.
His regard for his father, a physician who had gone to Philadelphia from Virginia, was profound. The father died when Mitchell was twenty-nine, his mother when he was forty-three. He married in the year that his father died, was widowed within four years, and remarried at forty-six, within a year of the death of a sister who had been running his house and rearing his two young sons.
Despite disappointment, frustration, and grief, he seemed to enjoy life from early to late; hence the reader may be surprised to learn that he recalled his boyhood as a period of 'wearisome ennui'. As a young man he carried a heavy load of family responsibility. One brother was a financial burden. Later one of his sons studied