Silas Weir Mitchell: Neurologists and Neurology during the American Civil War.

Abstract

With few exceptions, neurology was nonexistent in the United States until the Civil War years. From 1861 to 1865, the United States saw a bitter armed conflict between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederate States or Confederacy), and during those years, neurology was born in the United States. In 1861, Silas Weir Mitchell, together with George Morehouse and William Keen, opened and operated the first neurological hospital in Philadelphia, with the backing of the Surgeon General William Hammond. They treated and studied many peripheral nerve diseases, which led to their making the medical world aware of several conditions, including causalgia (now known as complex regional pain syndrome) and the phantom limb phenomenon. Progress in neurology, both at that time and in subsequent years, owed a great deal to cross-fertilization from Europe. Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard exemplified this. He held multiple medical positions on both sides of the Atlantic, including a position at Harvard in 1864. His teachings, to some extent, contributed to the development of neurology in the United States. In the Confederate states, medical care was less well organized, and neurology only developed later. After the war, in 1874, Mitchell, Hammond, and a few others founded the American Neurological Association. While war influenced the development of medicine, and neurology in particular, medicine also helped to shape the outcome of the war.