Fiction · 1900
The Autobiography of a Quack, and The Case of George Dedlow
The title story follows a man who has lost all four limbs in the Civil War and struggles, more than anything else, with the physical sensation that they're still there — one of the first pieces of American fiction to describe what's now called phantom limb syndrome, written by a doctor who had actually treated amputees and observed the phenomenon firsthand. The Autobiography of a Quack, paired with it here, is a very different kind of story: a former medical fraud's own account of how easy it was to build a career on confidence rather than competence.
S. Weir Mitchell was a practicing neurologist as well as a novelist, and drew directly on his clinical work treating Civil War veterans for The Case of George Dedlow, first published in the 1860s; this edition collects it alongside The Autobiography of a Quack.
Bibliomancer publishes the text exactly as S. Weir Mitchell wrote it.
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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