At a medical crossroads
The scale of the carnage in the Civil War required radical changes to the United States' medical infrastructure. In antebellum America, it was not to hospitals that infirm individuals would often turn. Hospitals, as modernly conceived, were rare and primarily for the indigent and insane. The horrid battles following the outbreak of the war, however, convinced Army administrators that this loose network was inadequate for battlefield casualties measured in the tens of thousands.
The scale of the carnage in the Civil War required radical changes to the United States' medical infrastructure.
In antebellum America, it was not to hospitals that infirm individuals would often turn. Hospitals, as modernly conceived, were rare and primarily for the indigent and insane. The horrid battles following the outbreak of the war, however, convinced Army administrators that this loose network was inadequate for battlefield casualties measured in the tens of thousands.
Philadelphia's tradition of medical education and its location at the vertices of several railroads brought nearly 157,000 wounded soldiers and sailors through its hospitals during the war. The city boasted two of the largest military sick bays in the country, including the 3,000-bed Satterlee General Hospital - on the site of present-day Clark Park.
However, it was at a temporary hospital in North Philadelphia that groundbreaking medical practice was undertaken: Turner's Lane.
Situated on a then-country estate between Girard College and Eastern State Penitentiary, Turner's Lane Hospital was the first in the United States devoted exclusively to nerve injuries. Three contract surgeons - George Read Morehouse, William W. Keen, and S. Weir Mitchell - treated and studied thousands of amputees shipped to Turner's Lane after major engagements, including the Battle of Gettysburg.
"The opportunity was indeed unique and we knew it. . . . It was exciting in its constancy of novel interests," observed Mitchell. With the 1864 publication of Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves, the three physicians reported on their 18 months of experience tending to the grisly wounds of modern warfare. Their efforts "created a body of work that effectively founded American neurology," remarked Dr. Robert Hicks, director of the Mütter Museum.
Mitchell, a man of letters as much as a man of medicine, coined the term phantom limb to describe the nervous system's reaction to amputations and experimented with different methods for treating causalgia, a painful syndrome common to victims of peripheral nerve injuries. In the decades after the surrender at Appomattox, Mitchell contacted several of his former patients to study the impact of combat injuries on their later lives, one of the first longitudinal studies of its kind.
"In the latter part of the afternoon of a summer day in the year 1863, a little crowd gathered near the door of the military hospital . . . in the city of Philadelphia. Like the rest of the vast camps of the sick . . . this one has been lost, in the healing changes with which civilizing progress, no less quickly than forgiving nature, is apt to cover the traces of war."
And so began In War Time, Mitchell's 1884 novelized account of his experiences that would make even PBS's Mercy Street squeamish.
On Wednesday, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania will host "The Awful Harvest of Gettysburg and the Remarkable Year at Turner's Lane" as Dr. Robert Hicks explores the legacy of the hospital and the three young physicians that did much to secure the discipline of American neurology. Visit hsp.org/calendar to register.
