generally understood. As it involves some novelty, and as I do not find
it described elsewhere, I shall, I think, be doing a service to my
profession by relating my experience."

The following quotation from Dr. William Playfair's essay[1] says all
that I would care to add:

"The claims of Dr. Weir Mitchell to originality in the introduction
of this system of treatment, which I have recently heard contested
in more than one quarter, it is not my province to defend. I feel
bound, however, to say that, having carefully studied what has been
written on the subject, I can nowhere find anything in the least
approaching to the regular, systematic, and thorough attack on the
disease here discussed.

"Certain parts of the treatment have been separately advised, and
more or less successfully practised, as, for example, massage and
electricity, without isolation; or isolation and judicious moral
management alone. It is, in fact, the old story with regard to all
new things: there is no discovery, from the steam-engine down to
chloroform, which cannot be shown to have been partially foreseen,
and yet the claims of Watt and Simpson to originality remain
practically uncontested. And so, if I may be permitted to compare
small things with great, will it be with this. The whole matter was
admirably summed up by Dr. Ross, of Manchester, in his remarks in
the discussion I introduced at the meeting of the British Medical
Association at Worcester, which I conceive to express the precise
state of the case: 'Although Dr. Mitchell's treatment was not new
in the sense that its separate recommendations were made for the
first time, it was new in the sense that these recommendations were