S. Weir Mitchell

Fat and Blood S. Weir Mitchell

Silas Weir was a 19th century American physician and writer. He became a specialist in neurology after serving in the Civil War in charge of nervous injuries and maladies at Turners Lane Hospital, Philadelphia. Weir writes of curing neural conditions by a rest cure consisting of isolation, confinement to bed, dieting and massage. Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria was written in 1877. Weir states "The cases thus treated have been chiefly women of a class well known to every physician,--nervous women, who, as a rule, are thin and lack blood. Most of them have been such as had passed through many hands and been treated in turn for gastric, spinal, or uterine troubles, but who remained at the end as at the beginning, invalids, unable to attend to the duties of life, and sources alike of discomfort to themselves and anxiety to others."