A Contribution to the Study of the Effect of the Venom of Crotalus Adamanteus Upon the Blood of Man and Animals

Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898. First edition.

REPORT ON THE ACTION OF RATTLESNAKE VENOM ON HUMAN AND ANIMAL BLOOD WITH 6 COLOR PLATES BY NOTED AMERICAN NEUROLOGIST.

11 3/4 inches tall hardcover, leather covers with new cloth spine, published in Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume VIII, 14 pages with color plates, unmarked, very good.

SILAS WEIR MITCHELL (1829 - 1914) was an American physician and writer known for his discovery of causalgia and erythromelalgia. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania in that city, and received the degree of MD at Jefferson Medical College in 1850. During the Civil War he had charge of nervous injuries and maladies at Turners Lane Hospital, Philadelphia, and at the close of the war became a specialist in neurology. Silas Weir Mitchell discovered and treated causalgia (today known as CRPS/RSD), a condition most often encountered by hand surgeons. He is considered the father of neurology as well as an early pioneer in scientific medicine. He was also a psychiatrist, toxicologist, author, poet, and a celebrity in America and Europe. His many skills and interests led his contemporaries to consider him a genius on par with Benjamin Franklin. His contributions to medicine and particularly hand surgery continue to resonate today. In 1866 he wrote a short story, combining physiological and psychological problems, entitled The Case of George Dedlow in the Atlantic Monthly. From that point onward, Mitchell, as a writer, divided his attention between professional and literary pursuits. In the former field, he produced monographs on rattlesnake venom, on intellectual hygiene, on injuries to the nerves, on neurasthenia, on nervous diseases of women, on the effects of gunshot wounds upon the nervous system, and on the relations between nurse, physician, and patient; while in the latter, he wrote juvenile stories, several volumes of respectable verse.