As one might expect given this apparent crisis in character, patients who exhibited mental fortitude in disassociating themselves from their physical weaknesses were celebrated by physicians. Mitchell proudly recounts how “wounded men who are not weakened by loss of blood or excessive shock have a very natural curiosity as to the condition of the wounded part, and are apt almost immediately to handle it, and try to move it” (Gunshot 20). In this scenario, the injured body part—“it”—is rhetorically, and perhaps psychically separated from the individual. Early in Gunshot Wounds, the injuries are described rather mildly as “foreign” oddities; at a later point Mitchell comments upon the monkey-like appearance of a patient’s atrophied hand, bestializing the injury; finally, the injuries are strongly described as “grotesque deformity” (10, 24, 70). The progression of Mitchell’s imagery through the text signals his increasing frustration with the disease’s resistance to treatment and the patient’s inability to maintain corporeal integrity. As patients continue to suffer from their injuries, their humanity is systematically stripped away; likening their psychic realities to their atrophying limbs, Mitchell de-evolves the patients until they are no longer even animal-like, but monstrous. Although patients and doctors used this rhetoric for purposes of self-preservation, certainly one could not use such debasing language without imputing the individual.
Mitchell’s stories of patients who do not feel pain and who exhibit courageous fortitude served an additional social function, that is, in Morris’s words to persuade his audience “that they had nothing to fear from pain, at least when they suffered in a great cause.”14 This self-alienation was a necessary coping mechanism for a soldier who might be horrifyingly mutilated, let alone faced with the amputation of some body part. It gave the patient the illusion of an essential self that was protected from the ills that afflicted the self’s shell. In its own way, this strategy combated midcentury physiological views of the reliable correspondence between the body and the mind. Certainly, their wounded bodies did not represent the physical self-portrait to which injured soldiers had been accustomed before the war. In many cases patients preferred amputation to deformity, perhaps believing that in excising the offensive, dehumanizing marks of war, they would be able to regain some semblance of their antebellum selves. Mitchell relates how he was “again and again urged by patients to amputate the suffering limb” as if it were apart from the patient’s economy, a distantly suffering relation of whom the patient was fond but wished to put out of his or her misery (Gunshot 105). In addition, the amputated body, it was hoped, could provide a more accurate and healthy representation of the inner self than a whole but deformed body.
In “The Case of George Dedlow” Mitchell imaginatively explores the whole range of ontological states accompanying the physical undoing he encounters in Gunshot Wounds. Here Mitchell demonstrates the psychic and metaphoric death that can eventually accompany drastic changes in a person’s physical experience of him- or herself or, as George phrases it, “how much a man might lose and yet live” (“Dedlow” 8). This is no conventional war story; we get only the sketchiest details of George’s battlefield exploits. Rather, Mitchell concentrates on the “metaphysical discoveries” related to injury and loss of selfhood, presenting the gory details in order to “possess [the audience] with the facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body” (“Dedlow” 1, 5). At the beginning of the story George describes his first injury in much the same terms Mitchell initially used in Gunshot Wounds. George is able to detach himself from his body, to look at his hand hanging loosely from his shattered arm and remark, “The hand might as well have been that of a dead man.” He then proceeds to relate a thorough examination during which he determines the extent of the injury (“Dedlow” 2). However, sensation eventually does return, and the story illustrates that the feeling that persists after an injury is often reduced to pain when initiated through the gauntlet of the Civil War. The injured limb is “alive only to pain” and so is “dead” in every other sense (“Dedlow” 3). George begins to refer to his arm as if he were watching his own corpse, detaching from it and yet still feeling its miseries.
Initially Mitchell is eager to make George’s pain meaningful. When George explains to a pastor that he feels fine “except this hand which is dead except to pain,” Mitchell refers to nerve injury as a state not unlike purgatory or hell. The pastor makes that connection explicit when he warns, “Such you will be if you die in your sins; you will go where only pain can be felt. For all eternity, all of you will be as that hand,—knowing pain only” (“Dedlow” 3). Mitchell also suggests that George suffers for the sins of the Union; the doctor treating him in a prisoner-of-war camp is unable to relieve his pain with morphia because, he reminds George, “You don’t allow it to pass through the lines” (“Dedlow” 3). Whether or not the pain is a divine or martial punishment, both the pastor’s and the doctor’s explanations make sense of George’s pain, giving it a rationale and a predictable moral or spiritual meaning. The amputation of that arm functions not only as sanity-preserving detachment but also as expiation. Afterwards, George is calmly able to look at his amputated limb across the room and comment, “There is the pain, and here I am. How queer!” (“Dedlow” 3). The arm is no longer a body part; indeed, it is not even corporeal but instead signifies pure sensation for George. Who would not wish to rid one’s body of pain? It is only through excision that his identity can be maintained.
Yet none of these solutions suffice, for George’s body is endlessly vulnerable in the story. The continual pain does not transfigure Mitchell’s patients or his fictional George or make their suffering meaningful; instead, it reinforces the fragile continuity between the previous and presumably coherent self and the new body consciousness.15 Linking war, disease, and the (im)possibility of representation, George’s eventual amputations and phantom pain suggest that re-membering war is either an absence of feeling—a death, a gap—or unremitting, excruciating pain. Once all of George’s limbs are amputated, the pain does not end. In addition to throbbing or burning, George’s phantom limbs now have the additional effect of keeping “the brain ever mindful of the missing part, and, imperfectly at least, preserv[ing] to the man a consciousness of possessing that which he has not” (“Dedlow” 6). Throughout his subsequent amputations, George’s body-consciousness registers the dynamics of self and cultural history; he endures a pain that does not express the reality of his body or of the events he witnessed but only makes him aware of that which cannot be re-membered.
Consequently, when he awakes from the etherized sleep of the surgery during which his legs are amputated and “[gets] hold of [his] own identity,” as he puts it, he claims he is “suddenly aware of a sharp-cramp in [his] left leg” (“Dedlow” 5). George is horrified to discover that his awareness is a false one as his amused neighbor informs him he “aint [sic] got nary leg.” The longer he survives without his limbs, the more George feels his identity slipping away. “I found to my horror,” he writes, “that at times I was less conscious of my own existence, than used to be the case. I felt like asking some one constantly if I were really George Dedlow or not” (“Dedlow” 8). Life is theorized as more than simply physical existence in Mitchell’s writings; it is sentience, physical situatedness, a sense of individuality. Though George survives his injuries physically, psychologically he has been irreversibly lessened: “At the time the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming, and most painful. It was, as well as I can describe it, a deficiency in the egoistic sentiment of individuality. About one half of the sensitive surface of my skin was gone, and thus much of my relation to the world destroyed” (“Dedlow” 8).
He insists, as one medical ethicist has argued, “that life is not mere biological life … and human death