The next installment in our Halloween fright fest comes from the guy who brought us classics like “the rest cure” and a book called Fat and Blood: It’s Silas Weir Mitchell’s 1866 short story “The Case of George Dedlow.” The noted Philadelphia physician gave us this fine tale of a Civil War doctor(ish) who loses all of his limbs in a series of events so unfortunate you won’t believe people thought it was a true story. And you extra won’t believe that once you hear about the ending.

We chat about epistemology, the mind/body connection, nineteenth-century medicine, photography, the genre of the case, and which one of the Real Housewives is most Christ-like.

We read the version from the 1900 publication The Autobiography of a Quack and the Case of George Dedlow. Go to the Mütter Museum. We recommend checking out Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (2017) by Shauna Devine for further reading.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.