As such, George’s self seeps away, lacking the material sounding board, the friction through which he had been discernible. By the time he has lost all of his limbs, not only has George lost his identity, but he is also struggling to maintain his humanity. Rather than transcending his body, George becomes primarily identified through its absence. He is a “useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape. Of my anguish and horror of myself I dare not speak” (“Dedlow” 5).17 He is unable to escape his decimated body—a body that makes visible the dehumanizing nature of war. His “useless” torso, shorn of its limbs by another human being, demands that we see the barbarity of war and the insensible self it ushered in.
Ultimately, Mitchell’s medical rhetoric was unequal to the task of rehabilitating strange and debilitating nerve injuries like George’s wrought by Civil War combat. His hermeneutical project was continually thwarted by his inability to read his patients and fit their symptoms into preexisting categories. The greatest test of the Civil War doctor’s ability was the endless task of accurately and precisely taxonomizing nerve injury, because “it assumed all kinds of forms, from the burning, which we have yet fully to describe, through the whole catalogue of terms vainly used to convey some idea of variety in torture” (Gunshot 101). Further, the “causes are indeed so numerous and so perplexing related in individual cases that it is not always easy to assign to each its share in the production of defects of motility” (Gunshot 119). Mitchell sums up his frustration in despairing of describing seizures, for they have such a great variety of symptoms that they “know no law” (“Malingering” 384). As George’s dissolution demonstrates, these diseases unbound and unfixed the idea of a stable corporeality that was central to any notion of rehabilitation. Nerve diseases were particularly insidious; they could extend from the site of the injury to affect other parts of the body, to transfer “pathological changes from a wounded nerve to unwounded nerves.” The very unpredictability of this malady, its ability to strike seemingly healthy and unaffected parts of the body, suggested not only the instability of life on the battlefield but also the war’s ability to affect even those seemingly insulated from its brutality.
The vagaries of the nerves insinuated themselves into Mitchell’s composing processes as well. Some of Mitchell’s frustration stemmed from the phenomenal transformations taking place in medical practice at the time. It is important to keep in mind that medical writing of the 1860s was quite different from that of our own time. Yet Mitchell’s Civil War work was part of a larger shift in medical praxis, as the “healing art” practiced by doctors such as Benjamin Rush was being transformed into a science. One medical historian explains that mid-nineteenth-century scientific writing was more leisurely, personal, and genteel than it was in subsequent decades: “With less editorial pressure, papers were frequently longer, more idiosyncratic and often autobiographical.”18 In a passage from his unpublished autobiography, Mitchell likens the writing of his medical articles to the mysterious process that overtakes him when writing fiction or poetry, where you “wait watching the succession of ideas that come when you keep an open mind”:
I seem to be dealing with ideas which come from what I call my mind, but as to the mechanism of the process, beyond a certain point it is absolutely mystery. I say, “I will think this over. How does it look? To what does it lead?” Then comes to me from some inward somewhere criticisms, suggestions, in a word, ideas, about the ultimate origins of which I know nothing.19
Though I would not argue that Mitchell’s scientific work is wholly fictional, the close connection in his mind between scientific and literary inspiration illustrates the transitional nature of his scientific work and the persistent difficulties of creating a precision between narrative and bodily experience. Debra Journet suggests that in “The Case of George Dedlow” “fictional techniques enable Mitchell to explore a phenomenon that he could not fully articulate within the scientific paradigms of his time.”20 Yet the etiology of nerve injury suggests that accounting for the idiosyncrasies of the human body is always a theoretical endeavor.
Most significant about Mitchell’s self-reflexive passage on his medical composing process is that he cannot locate the “ultimate origins” of the theories he produces in his medical texts. Although one would guess, given the tenets of scientific praxis Mitchell advocated, that his patients’ bodies would serve as the foundation and original material for Mitchell’s texts, this candid passage suggests that the origins of his body theory emerged from the individual subconscious. Indeed, in “The Case of George Dedlow”—the work that most clearly muddies both the artistic and scientific intentions that animate Mitchell’s writing—George metaphorically links bodily inscription and textual production. In recounting the story of his last injury in battle, George explains that the events of that day are “burned into my memory with every least detail” and reiterates “no other scene in my life is thus scarred, if I may say so, into my memory” (“Dedlow” 4, emphasis added). He uses the language of corporeal branding to express the permanent alteration his psyche sustained along with his body. Continuing his description, George also says that the moment of injury is “printed on my recollection” (“Dedlow” 4). Using the terms burned, scarred and printed interchangeably in this passage to express how injury impresses itself on bodies, psyches, and texts, Mitchell inextricably links the moment of bodily injury, the genesis of textual production, and the ability to access the past. The body literally is inscribed by historical events—each wound marks their reality. Yet the body’s inability to re-member—indeed, its volatility and substantial immateriality—indicates its lack of originative integrity for narratives of medicine and history.
The generic confusion “The Case of George Dedlow” provoked among its readers speaks not only to the amorphousness of medical authority at the time but also to the public’s fears and desires about the authenticity of nerve injuries. In the opening paragraphs of the story, Mitchell purposefully exploits his readers, explaining that this story had “been declined on various pretexts by every medical journal to which I have offered” it (“Dedlow” 1). Thus he alerts readers immediately that the world of peer-reviewed scientific medicine denies the validity of the case history to come. However, he goes on to explain that although the story may not have any “scientific value,” it has led him to new “metaphysical discoveries” that some readers have found valuable (“Dedlow” 1). Thus the text is supramedical; this introduction might have proven attractive to readers who found the medical community and their narratives of health inadequate and unable to account for the spiritual realms of experience so appealing to a country in mourning. The fact that Mitchell laces his story with accounts of actual battles and references to real regiments and hospitals also lends the story its veracity. Of equal importance, George Dedlow is a doctor, a professional identity that increasingly connoted authority.
Finally, though the narrator eschews the institutional world of medical science, he employs the scientific tropes of experimentation and repetition. George constantly situates his experiences in a larger context. For example, after describing his thoughts and sensations during his first amputation, George writes, “At a subsequent period I saw a number of cases similar to mine in a hospital in Philadelphia” (“Dedlow” 4). And later, “There were collected in this place [“the Stump Hospital”] hundreds of these