Abstract
Civil War battlefields required the evacuation of large numbers of wounded to Northern cities. As the second most important hospital city in the North after Washington, DC, Philadelphia sheltered about 157,000 injured soldiers. The large number of amputees presented an opportunity to army contract surgeon S. Weir Mitchell, MD (1829–1914), who was already emerging as a physician of note in Philadelphia before the war. Mitchell asked his friend US Army Surgeon General William Hammond to set up a special hospital to treat and study injuries to the nerves. During the last year of the war, Hammond assembled one of the most unusual and important temporary hospitals at Turner's Lane in Philadelphia. Mitchell and his hand-picked associates, William W. Keen, MD, and George R. Morehouse, MD, collectively known as "the Firm," found at Turner's Lane an unparalleled opportunity to study diseases and wounds of the nerves. The team was conscious of the history-making nature of their work: "The opportunity was indeed unique and we knew it . . . it was exciting in its constancy of novel interest." In addition to seeing patients, Mitchell and his team found time to publish a systematic study of peripheral nerve injuries among injured soldiers, Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves (1864). The first hospital to treat nerve injuries, Turner's Lane created a body of work that effectively founded American neurology.