Yet at war’s end nerve injuries were still incurable, the soldiers unrehabilitated. Mitchell’s final prognosis in the conclusion of Gunshot Wounds is that “the neural lesion may have been long well, and the ill it did live after it” (144). Mitchell’s only real power lay in restoring some semblance of normality to the surface appearance of the body while coercing appropriate, obedient behavior. The disciplined, healed body seals the wound inside; the ghostly presence of long-gone limbs channels a corporeal reality that, Mitchell suspects, was never sure-footed. As he claims, “It would be in vain to amputate a member while the scar lies beyond it” (Gunshot 106). Though the injury had been metaphorically excised from the patient’s body and mind through Mitchell’s course of treatment, in reality the wounds of war remained in the patient in some unlocatable place.
“What Is True of Disease Is True of War”
After Mitchell’s brief rest cure and the cessation of hostilities, he took up the compelling research he had begun in the nerve hospital; however, he found it impossible to make a living from this work. On July 11, 1868, Mitchell wrote to his sister Elizabeth that “the laboratory does not flourish,” joking that his “cerebrum is softening.” By July 1870 he admits defeatedly, “This year indeed every year now makes physiological research harder for those who cannot give their whole time to it.”37 At the same time, Mitchell discovered that he was consulted more and more about treating nervous maladies; Gunshot Wounds had gained prominence in its field and was expanded and re-issued in 1871 to wide acclaim. Capitalizing on the situation, Mitchell adapted his wartime therapies to treat upper-class female patients, consequently making a name for himself—and a lucrative living—as the world-renowned, charismatic “rest cure” doctor. Eventually, he gave up not only his research but also his general practice, focusing exclusively on cases of nervous disease. But despite his great success, he was still drawn inexorably to his war-era stints at Philadelphia’s hospitals and to the professional and personal crises that first became evident during his tenures there.
Although Mitchell had published anonymous poems and short stories throughout the 1860s and 1870s, by the 1880s he was willing to claim his profession as part-time author, a self-described “literary physician who still remained loyal to medicine.” In War Time was given a prominent position when it ran in the Atlantic Monthly during 1884; reviews and subsequent book sales were favorable according to Mitchell’s biographer, Joseph Lovering. In this novel, Mitchell fully articulated the interconnections between medical narratives, fiction, and the Civil War that were evident in his earlier work. In particular, the affinity between his experimental medical texts and realistic fictions continued to animate his writing. Mitchell bragged that a therapeutic ethos pervaded his fiction; as he notably remarked, “There is a clinic” in every one of his books. He reveals to one correspondent that In War Time contains a “description of a case of locomotion ataxia,” one that “conceal[s] the knowledge which a dr. has of these cases & … use [s] only enough to interest without disgusting.”38 He assures his intimate thus that his fictions are built upon the presumably firm foundation of medical science. Those “in the know” would surely recognize his characters’ symptoms and be able to diagnose their diseases. Yet he confuses the work of the author, the doctor, and the medium or confidence man in this description as well, for he writes that he conceals the mechanisms by which he maintains the “interest” and credibility of his audience.
The congruence between his medical and fictional hermeneutics caused Mitchell a great deal of anxiety, which he expresses again and again in his private correspondence. In a letter to his great supporter, William Dean Howells, Mitchell explains, “I am twins and one is an amateur literateur in summer and goes to sleep in winter while the other attends to the literature of prescription.”39 Here Mitchell invents a professional schizophrenia to account for his dual interests and attempts to make them distinct from each other. Yet the fact that the “literateur” merely hibernates when the prescriptive writer takes over does not separate the two personae, for surely the dreams of the sleeper intrude upon the conscious self. Further, Mitchell twins his work, making the two “literature[s]” if not identical, at least fraternal. Mitchell’s pride in his literary success clearly struggles with his need to downplay that success, for he senses that the plausibility of his fictional “clinics” might cast suspicion on the authority of his scientific work. In his autobiography, Mitchell writes that In War Time “had a large success, and trusting the good sense of the American people to know whether I was any the less a good doctor because I could write a novel, I continued to thus amuse myself.”40 Working in a still fledgling profession, Mitchell was keenly aware that he might be perceived as a dilettante for dabbling in the arts. He also implies that his facility with language and his ability to create credible characters and situations might undermine his medical authority. In transferring the language of medical narratives to literary ones and vise versa, the novels might confuse the distinctions between art and science, fact and fiction. As we have seen, lay readers perceived no difference between Mitchell’s case histories and his stories. And because In War Time depicts in particular the duplicity and murderous mistakes of a very bad doctor, it seems logical that Mitchell might have worried that patients would turn from a practitioner who seemed to know the thoughts and motivations of a bad doctor so very intimately. Dr. Ezra Wendell might be read as the omnipresent nightmare of the waking doctor.
However, admirers chalked up Mitchell’s detailed knowledge of the incompetent Dr. Wendell to his superior medical skills, his ability to discern the thoughts and motivations of his neurasthenic patients. Howells speaks for many when he claims, “There has seldom been a man in fiction so perfectly divined as Wendell,” implying that Mitchell had merely fathomed the inferior Wendell’s thoughts in godlike fashion.41 According to Eugenia Kaledin, Mitchell delineated such diseased characters in order to “help his literary patients perceive the good life.” In his journal Mitchell conflated disease and culture, writing that “good manners” could be “contagious.”42 Much in the same way that his war-era medical texts were meant to redress the demoralization of nerve patients, his novels of manners were prescribed as antidotes to what he perceived as an increasingly undisciplined citizenry. Dr. Wendell is a case in point. Though of supposedly good Anglo-Saxon stock, he is a weak, immoral spendthrift. His behavior is contrasted to that of the characters who make up his wartime community: his sister Ann, a Puritanical, unintellectual spinster; Alice Westerly, a strong, principled woman who is attracted by Wendell’s dreaminess, but who is ultimately deceived by him; and Edward Morton, the man who suffers from the aforementioned “locomotion ataxia,” but who bravely battles his illness and sacrifices his love in order to ensure his brother’s happiness. These are just a few of the many characters who enact this very convoluted plot of love and betrayal, honor and disgrace, death and redemption. Yet Wendell unfailingly appears the weaker by comparison.
Perhaps what is most distinctive about Mitchell’s diverse oeuvre, and what makes it a fit starting point for this project, is that his work imagines the Civil War as the primary site for explorations of the disruptions of the flesh and soul. Mitchell’s son testified that in his deathbed delirium Mitchell ordered treatments for the suffering soldiers streaming in after the Battle of Gettysburg, and it is at this same martial crossroads that Mitchell began his first novel. As In War Time’s action begins, Dr. Wendell is attending to the wounded and dying in a long-gone Civil War hospital. Yet the narrative voice soothingly notes of those makeshift outfits: “The rest of the vast camps of the sick, which added in those days to the city population some twenty-five thousand of the maimed and ill … ha[ve] been lost, in the healing changes with which civilizing progress, no less quickly than forgiving nature, is apt to cover the traces of war” (War Time 1). One might argue that Mitchell implies Civil War rehabilitations are complete. At the very least, he rhetorically rehabilitates, stating that the “healing changes” of “progress” “cover the traces of war.” To return to the etymology of habile, the wounds of war have been covered over, re-clothed. Yet significantly, Mitchell writes that the “maimed and ill” have been “lost,” not erased or obliterated. The lost may linger; like neural lesions, they persist despite their inability to