Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin.

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,, 1887. Presented to a fellow novelist First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title, "Dr S. Weir Mitchell, with the grateful good wishes of Robert Louis Stevenson", and with Mitchell's armorial bookplate loosely inserted. This is a fascinating presentation, revealing the important connections between science, medicine, and literature in the 1880s. The recipient, Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), was an American physician and novelist. As a doctor, he made several important early contributions to neurology, pioneering the rest cure, "a method he developed in the early 1870s for the treatment of a variety of nervous conditions, emphasizing isolation, bed rest, and a rich but bland diet" (ANB). When he prescribed the rest cure to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of his patients, he provided the authoress with inspiration for her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", in which the narrator is driven mad after being confined to her bed. As a novelist, Mitchell was part of the American arm of a literary culture increasingly interested in neurological innovations - a movement led in Britain by Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. Mitchell himself, in Doctor and Patient (1888), refers to Stevenson as "a delightful master of style". The year of the present book's publication, 1887, was marked for Stevenson by a bout of severe depression, exacerbated by "an insane father, a hysterical mother, a neurotic wife and a feckless fainéant stepson" (McLynn, p. 274). That year he wrote to Mitchell, advising him that "You are going to be interviewed on my behalf by a Mr and Dr Lea" (Beinecke, p. 999). It seems likely that Stevenson sought Mitchell's medical counsel, and presented him a copy of his latest book in gratitude. Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin was written as a tribute to Stevenson's professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin, a Scottish engineer and one of the most important figures in Stevenson's life. Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, covers ruled in blind, teal coated endpapers. Housed in a custom black cloth folding box. With 8 pp. of publisher's advertisements at the rear. Spine darkened, extremities lightly rubbed, a couple of faint stains, short closed tear to head of half-title, contents clean. A very good copy. Edward John Beinecke, ed., A Stevenson Library: Autograph Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife, 1956; Robert McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, 1993.