THE city of Philadelphia was at one time renowned for its School of Medicine. Students flocked there from all parts of America to attend the clinics of surgeons like Dr. Agnew and Dr. Gross. And these two distinguished anatomists found their Rembrandt in a contemporary artist, Thomas Eakins, whose masterly delineation of their clinics compares favourably with that of the famous Lessons in Anatomy, in Amsterdam.
It was to be expected that a man of Weir Mitchell's imaginative and poetic temperament would select that branch of medical science which gives greater play to the metaphysical faculties than the more exact practice of surgery. His early student days coincided with the first investigations by the new school of neurologists into temperament; and psychology, as a new word to describe an old but until then little-considered thing, was bandied about in hospital and theatre, in ballroom and sickroom. The treatment of the alimentary canal gave place to the study of the spinal cord. Neurosis and neurasthenia explained all the disorders of the dyspeptic.
Dr. Mitchell was by inclination a naturalist: whether through premeditation or predestination, knowingly or ignorantly, he took Aristotle for his guide. The aristocratic principle, that supports all the arguments of the Greek
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