The history of medicine and of the earliest medical men in Kentucky clusters around the name of Transylvania University. The State of Virginia, in 1780—when "Kan-tuck-ee" or "Kentuckee," as this country was then called, was only a little-explored portion of that State—placed eight thousand acres of escheated lands within that county into the hands of thirteen trustees "for the purposes of a public school or seminary of learning," that they "might at a future day be a valuable fund for the maintenance and education of youth; it being the interest of this Commonwealth always to promote and encourage every design which might tend to the improvement of the mind and the diffusion of knowledge, even amongst the most remote citizens, whose situation a barbarous neighborhood and a savage intercourse might otherwise render unfriendly to science."Three years thereafter (1783), when Kentucky had become a district of Virginia, the General Assembly, by a new amendatory Act, re-endowed this "public school" with twelve thousand acres more of escheated lands and gave to it all the privileges, powers, and immunities of "any college or university in the State," under the name of "Transylvania Seminary." In the wild and sparsely settled country this seminary began a feeble existence under the special fostering care and patronage of the Presbyterians, who were then a leading religious body, aided by individual subscriptions and by additional State endowments. The Reverend James Mitchel, a Presbyterian minister, was its first "Grammar Master," in 1785. In 1789 it was placed under the charge of Mr. Isaac Wilson and located in Lexington, with no more than thirteen pupils all told. The Reverend James Moore, educated for the Presbyterian ministry but subsequently an Episcopalian and first Rector of Christ Church, Lexington, was appointed "Director," or the first acting President of the Transylvania Seminary, in 1791.[1] He taught in his own house for want of a proper seminary building, with the aid of a small library and collection of philosophical apparatus. This library and apparatus had been donated by the Reverend John Todd, of Virginia, who, with other influential Presbyterians, had been mainly instrumental in procuring the charters and endowments from the General Assembly of Virginia. The offer of a lot of ground in the town of Lexington[2] to the trustees of Transylvania Seminary, by a company of gentlemen calling themselves the "Transylvania Land Company," induced the trustees to permanently locate the seminary in that place in 1793. On that lot the first school and college buildings were placed, and on it was afterward erected the more commodious University edifice in which taught the learned and celebrated President, Doctor Horace Holley. This first University building was destroyed by fire May 9, 1829. In later years (1879) this old "College lot" was beautified and improved by tree-planting and otherwise by liberal citizens of Lexington, moved by the efforts of Mr. H. H. Gratz, and designated first "Centennial Park,"[3] and afterward "Gratz Park," in honor of Benjamin Gratz, being not now utilized for special educational purposes. With limited success the first "Director of Transylvania Seminary" taught in Lexington until 1794, when he was superseded by the election by the Board of Trustees of Mr. Harry Toulmin as first President of the Seminary. This gentleman, a learned Unitarian minister of the school of Doctor Priestly, and a native of England, resigned the Presidency in 1796, and was Secretary of State of Kentucky under Governor Garrard. (See Collins' History of Kentucky, volume 2, page 184.) Intense feeling at the election of Mr. Toulmin on the part of the leading Presbyterians, who claimed the Seminary as their own peculiar institution, caused them to obtain in 1796 a charter from the Legislature of Kentucky—now a State—for a new institution of learning which they could more exclusively control. This was the "Kentucky Academy," of which the Reverend James Blythe, of their communion, was made President.[4]On the establishment of the Kentucky Academy by the dissatisfied Presbyterians in 1796, an active rivalry between that school and Transylvania Seminary operated to the injury of both institutions as well as to the cause of education in general. Therefore, after two years of separate existence these two institutions, with the consent of the trustees of both, were united in 1798 by Act of the General Assembly of Kentucky into one, "for the promotion of public good and learning," under the title of Transylvania University. The consolidation was made under the original laws which governed the Transylvania Seminary as enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia.
Transylvania University. Under the act of consolidation of December 22, 1798, this University was organized by the appointment of Reverend James Moore, of the Episcopal Church, as first acting President, with a corps of professors. And now, for the first time in the Mississippi Valley, was the effort made to establish a medical college. Early in 1799, at the first meeting of the trustees of the new Transylvania University,[5] they instituted "The Medical Department" or College of Transylvania—which subsequently became so prosperous and so celebrated—by the appointment of Doctor Samuel Brown as Professor of Chemistry, Anatomy, and Surgery, and Doctor Frederick Ridgely as Professor of Materia Medica, Midwifery, and Practice of Physic. Doctor Brown qualified as Professor October 26, 1799, and Doctor Ridgely the following November. Doctor Brown was authorized by the Board to import books and other means of instruction for the use of the medical professors to the amount of five hundred dollars[6]—a considerable sum in those days—and he and his colleague were made salaried officers of the University. A Law College was also organized at this time in the University by the appointment of Colonel George Nicholas, soldier of the Revolution and member of the Virginia Convention, as Professor of Law and Politics.
Doctor Samuel Brown, The first Medical Professor of Transylvania University and of the great Western country, was born in Augusta, or Rockbridge County, Virginia, January 30, 1769, and died near Huntsville, Alabama, at the residence of Colonel Thomas G. Percy, January 12, 1830. He was the son of Reverend John Brown, a Presbyterian minister of great learning and piety, and Margaret Preston—a woman of remarkable energy of character and vigor of mind—second daughter of John Preston and Elizabeth Patton.[7] He was the third of four distinguished brothers—Honorable John Brown, Honorable James Brown, Doctor Samuel Brown, and Doctor Preston Brown. After graduating at Carlisle College, Pennsylvania, where he had been sent by his elder brother, he studied medicine for two years in Edinburgh, Scotland. Doctor Hosack, of New York, and Doctor E. McDowell, of Danville, Kentucky, were of the same class. Returning to the United States, he commenced practice in Bladensburg, but soon removed to Lexington, Kentucky, where he was made Professor of Chemistry, Anatomy, and Surgery in Transylvania University in 1799, as above stated. In 1806, he removed to Fort Adams, Mississippi, where he married Miss Percy, of Alabama.[8] Afterward returning to Lexington he was re-appointed in 1819 to a chair in the Medical Department of Transylvania, that of Theory and Practice. Here he was a distinguished colleague of Professors B. W. Dudley, Charles Caldwell, Daniel Drake, William Richardson, and James Blythe until 1825, when he finally left Kentucky.Doctor Brown was a man of fine personal appearance and manners; an accomplished scholar, gifted with a natural eloquence and humor that made him one of the most fascinating lecturers of his day. Learned in many branches, he was an enthusiast in his own profession, scrupulous in regard to etiquette and exceedingly benevolent and liberal of his time and services to the poor. Although active in scientific pursuits he left no extensive work, and but a few detached writings to perpetuate his fame. Portrait of Doctor Brown DOCTOR SAMUEL BROWN.
From Jouett's Portrait at Frankfort. His name appears among those of the contributors to the American Philosophical Transactions, and to the medical and scientific periodicals of the day, both in this country and in Europe. In those Transactions and in Bruce's Journal of Mineralogy, etc., he described a remarkably large nitre cavern on Crooked Creek in Madison County (now Rockcastle County), Kentucky. In this and in a subsequent communication in Volume I of Silliman's Journal he described the process of nitre manufacture in caves, and gave the best theory of its formation, according to the science of the day. In various other journals he described several interesting cases which occurred in his own practice, and in the renowned Medical Logic, by the distinguished Gilbert Blane, of London, Doctor Samuel Brown, of Lexington, is quoted as authority for a certain scientific fact. "To him we are indebted for the first introduction in the West of the prophylactic use of the cow-pox. As early as 1802 he had vaccinated upwards of five hundred persons, when in New York and Philadelphia physicians were only just making their first experimental attempts. The virus he used was taken from its original source, the teats of the cow, and used in Lexington even before Jenner could gain the confidence of the people of his own country."[9] A curious anecdote, illustrating progress, was told of Doctor Samuel Brown by his nephew, the late Orlando Brown, Esquire, of Frankfort, in a letter to the present writer: "I remember once when talking of calomel, he said he never would forget the first dose of it he gave a patient. It was looked upon as 'the Hercules,' and he used it accordingly. The case was desperate and he resolved to venture upon calomel and give a strong dose. He accordingly weighed out with scrupulous accuracy four grains—gave it to his patient, and sat up all night to watch its effects. The man got well and the Doctor afterwards used calomel more freely." What would he have thought of the heaping tablespoonful doses—quickly repeated pro re nata—or the pound of calomel taken in a day—and survived—which characterized the cholera treatment of one of the later Professors of Transylvania Medical School?
Doctor Frederick Ridgely, Of a well-known family in Maryland,[10] and one of the most celebrated of the early physicians of the West, studied medicine in Delaware, and attended medical lectures in Philadelphia. He was appointed Surgeon to a rifle corps in Virginia when only nineteen years of age, and served in different positions as Surgeon throughout the Revolutionary War. He came to Kentucky in 1790, was Surgeon-General in General Wayne's army in 1794, and after that decisive campaign was ended returned to Kentucky in 1799 and was made Professor of Materia Medica, Midwifery, and the Practice of Physic in the same year in the Medical Department of Transylvania University at the first organization of this department. Widely known as a successful practitioner and a gentleman of great benevolence, disinterestedness, and affability, he was also one of the medical preceptors of Kentucky's distinguished surgeon, Benjamin W. Dudley, and for many years gave active support to Transylvania University as a member of the Board of Trustees. In 1799–1800, he delivered to the small class of medical students then in attendance a course of public instruction which did him much credit—a fact of peculiar interest, "as it proves him to have been," with his able colleague, Doctor Samuel Brown, "the first who taught medicine by lecture in Western America." He died at the age of sixty-eight at Dayton, Ohio, December 21, 1824. These first medical professors in Transylvania University were no doubt the first in the promotion of medical education in the West. Medical and Law societies were soon established and were in active operation—as we learn from the columns of the Kentucky Gazette, published at the time. How many pupils they attracted and taught we can not now definitely ascertain. In 1801, the meager existing records of the University show a reorganization, in which the Reverend James Moore—who had been replaced in 1799 by a Presbyterian clergyman, the Reverend James Welsh—was restored to the Presidency. "Doctor Frederick Ridgely was made Professor of Medicine, and Doctor Walter Warfield was made Professor of Midwifery, in addition to Doctor Samuel Brown." Doctor Warfield, a physician of Lexington, did not long occupy this chair, and appears not to have lectured in it. In 1804, the Reverend James Blythe, D. D., of the Presbyterian church, who had been President of Kentucky Academy, was made acting President of Transylvania University, which position he held until 1816. He was subsequently, in 1817, under Doctor Holley's administration, appointed Professor of Chemistry, etc., in the Medical Department. This position he retained until, in 1831, he accepted the Presidency of Hanover College, Indiana. Doctor Blythe died in 1842, aged seventy-seven, having devoted his life mainly to religion; having been one of the pioneers of the Presbyterian church in Kentucky. He made no distinguished reputation as a chemical professor in the Medical School, for chemistry in those days had few advocates, but he did good service in the University as a teacher of what was called "Natural Philosophy" in early times. The Medical College of Transylvania University seems not to have attracted many students in this early period of its history, nor were its means of instruction or its organization complete. In 1805, Doctor James Fishback, D. D., was made Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic in this department.[11] He was characterized as an eloquent, learned, though erratic divine; an able writer; a physician in good practice; an influential lawyer, and an upright man. He was the son of Jacob Fishback,[12] who came to Kentucky from Virginia in 1783. He resigned this chair in 1806, having given lectures to such small medical classes as were present. In 1808, he was elected Representative to the General Assembly of Kentucky. In 1813, he published The Philosophy of the Mind in Respect to Religion, and, in 1834, Essays and Dialogues on the Powers and Susceptibilities of the Human Mind to Religion. He was also preceptor in medicine, and for a time partner in the practice, of the celebrated surgeon, Benjamin W. Dudley. He died at an advanced age in 1854. An effort was again made to organize a full Faculty and establish a medical school in Transylvania University in the year 1809, when Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley was appointed to the chair of Anatomy and Physiology, Doctor Elisha Warfield to Surgery and Obstetrics, Joseph Buchanan, A. M., to the Institutes of Medicine, and Doctor James Overton to Materia Medica and Botany.[13] But Doctor Warfield resigned in the same year, and Doctor Buchanan in 1810. The late Lewis Rogers, M. D., of Louisville, thus mentioned Doctor Buchanan in his inaugural address as President of the Kentucky State Medical Society in 1873: "He died in Louisville in 1829: and I call up from the memories of my boyhood with great distinctness his slender form, massive head, and thoughtful, intellectual face. He was a man of great and varied powers of mind. He was a mechanical, medical, and political philosopher. His 'spiral' steam-boiler—the prototype of the exploding and exploded tubular boiler—and his steam land-carriage were among the wonders of the day. As a physician his papers attracted distinguished notice from the medical savants of Philadelphia, then the center of medical science." As a political writer he ably discussed the most weighty problems of the times, he being editor of the Louisville Focus. Want of concentration of his wonderful mind prevented him from becoming eminent in medicine as in other pursuits which divided his mental powers.[14] No systematic medical instruction seems to have resulted from this imperfect organization of the Medical School in 1809, although occasional lectures may have been delivered and private instruction given.Doctor Dudley, after having graduated in medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, visited Europe in 1810, spending four years in Paris and London in the arduous pursuit of medical and surgical information and experience under the celebrated teachers of that day. Returning then to Lexington he began a career as a practical surgeon and teacher, in which his name became distinguished throughout the civilized world.
Doctor Benjamin Winslow Dudley Was born in Spottsylvania County, Virginia, April 12, 1785. His father, a leading Baptist minister in Kentucky, Ambrose Dudley, had commanded a company in the Revolutionary War, and removed to the neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky, when his son Benjamin was little more than a year old, and to that city in 1797. Here, reared with such tuition as the schools of the day and the country afforded, Benjamin was placed while yet very young under the medical tutelage of Doctor Frederick Ridgely, then an eminent physician in large practice in Lexington, under whose instruction his ardent taste for medical knowledge was largely gratified. In the autumn of 1804 he went to the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and was there fellow-student with Daniel Drake, John Esten Cooke, and William H. Richardson, his subsequent colleagues in the Medical Department of Transylvania University. Returning to Lexington at the close of the medical lectures at Philadelphia, he engaged in the practice of physic and surgery with Doctor Fishback during the spring and summer months of 1805. He returned to the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine from that institution March, 1806, just two weeks before he was twenty-one years of age. Desirous of perfecting his medical education in Europe, after a few years' further practice in Lexington he descended the Ohio River on a flatboat to New Orleans in 1810, just one year before the first experimental steamboat was launched upon those waters. At New Orleans he purchased a cargo of flour and sailed on a prosperous voyage to Gibraltar, and after advantageously disposing of his cargo at that place and at Lisbon, he made his way through Spain to Paris. After four years spent in Europe zealously and industriously employing all the great facilities of the hospitals, dissecting-rooms, and eminent instructors of Paris and London, and after traveling six months in Italy and Switzerland, he finally returned to Lexington in the summer of 1814, conscious of innate powers and ardently devoted to his profession. Portrait of Doctor Dudley DOCTOR BENJAMIN W. DUDLEY.
From a Portrait by Jouett owned by Mrs. Robert Peter. Professor Dudley continued to lecture until 1850, when he resigned and was appointed Professor Emeritus. Doctor James M. Bush succeeded him in the chair of Anatomy, and Dudley's nephew, Ethelbert L. Dudley, took that of Surgery, which he filled with great success. A schedule of the succession of the Professors of this Medical School will best illustrate the changes which occurred since 1819. (See Schedule A.) Professor B. W. Dudley remained in the regular performance of the duties of his double chair—Anatomy and Surgery[15]—with the able assistance of Doctor J. M. Bush, until 1844, when Doctor Bush was regularly appointed Professor of Anatomy. Doctor Dudley, as above mentioned, retained the chair of Surgery until 1850. In that year the Medical Faculty intermitted the winter session in Lexington, with the consent of the Trustees, in order to establish the "Kentucky School of Medicine" in Louisville as a winter school, retaining the Transylvania Medical College as a summer school. Doctor Dudley's last course of lectures was delivered in the session of 1849–50. Simultaneously with the resignation of his professorship, he withdrew from his extensive practice and retired to his beautiful suburban residence, "Fairlawn," in the vicinity of Lexington.[16] His death occurred in Lexington on the twentieth of January, 1870, in the eighty-fifth year of his age. Doctor Dudley was an earnest and laborious practical man. His whole time and energies were devoted to his profession, in which, like the celebrated John Hunter—the one of his early preceptors Dudley most admired—he sought instruction in the book of nature—in his practice—rather than in the written archives of science. As a teacher and lecturer he was admirably clear and impressive. While no attempt at eloquence was ever made by him, and no early training or later readings in the classics gave ornament to his style, his terse and impressive sentences, as they were delivered apparently without the slightest effort or premeditation as also without hesitation or interruption, were the embodiment of the ideas to be conveyed, in the most lucid and concise language. It seemed impossible to use fewer or more appropriate words to convey to the least appreciative student the subject to be taught. This, with his great practical skill as a surgeon, his minute and ready knowledge, his great experience, his unequaled success in his numerous operations, his suavity and dignity of manner, the magnanimity and liberality of his character, and his eminent devotedness to his profession, made his students most earnest admirers and followers and aided greatly in the establishment and maintenance of our Medical College. Although possessed of the firmest nerves, so that his hand never faltered in the severest operation,[17] his sensibility was so keen that he sometimes suffered from nervous prostration after the strain was over. Many of his pupils no doubt recollect with what feeling—manifested even by tears—he recited the sufferings and dangers of a patient of his who was the subject of obstinate secondary hemorrhage. It was as a practical surgeon that Doctor Dudley justly attained a world-wide reputation, and especially as a successful operator in lithotomy. This operation he performed two hundred and twenty-five times, without losing a single patient until after his one hundredth operation, losing in the whole of his operations only about two per cent. So celebrated had he become for this operation as early as 1827 that the Kentucky Gazette for April 11, of that year, records that he operated three times for stone in one day. He always performed the lateral operation with the gorget, and never until by previous preparation—by diet and medicine—he had brought the system of his patient to a proper state.[18] Then, with good nursing under his immediate direction in wholesome private lodging, the incision healed up by the first intention. Although the stone may have been so large that much effort was required to withdraw it through the incision—sometimes even attended with laceration—the patient was on his feet again in a surprisingly short period of time. The Doctor justly attached great importance to the preliminary constitutional preparation of his surgical patients. A notice of two of his earliest operations of this kind is given in the Kentucky Gazette for Saturday, November 19, 1817. The one—the first he performed in Lexington—on Mr. S. Owen, of that place, and the other, "some time ago," on a little boy in Paris, Kentucky, which, according to Doctor C. C. Graham—who was his pupil at that time—was the first operation for stone performed by Doctor Dudley. He never used lithotrity or seemed to approve of that operation. Another surgical specialty was his great use of judicious and regulated pressure by means of the roller bandage in the cure of abscesses, in the control of inflammation, in the treatment of fractures, aneurisms, etc. No surgeon probably ever used it so extensively or so successfully. Few, even of his pupils, seemed to be able to apply it with the skill and judgment which characterized their preceptor. He was also an earnest advocate of the patient use of hot water—as hot as could be borne—in the control of inflammation. Where other surgeons resorted to poultices he applied hot water. He was not ready with his pen; because, probably, of early neglect in the practice of composition. What he wrote was mostly at the urgent solicitation of his colleagues, and for the columns of The Transylvania Journal of Medicine, a quarterly which first appeared in Lexington February, 1828.[19] It was then edited by his colleagues, Professors Cooke and Short; subsequently by Professor Yandell, then by Professor Peter, more lately by Professor T. D. Mitchell, and lastly by Professor Ethelbert L. Dudley. In the first volume of this Journal appeared Doctor Dudley's first paper, a most remarkable article, showing by cases in his practice that epilepsy may be caused by pressure on the brain, the consequence of fracture of the skull, and, as demonstrated by five successive operations, might be cured by trephining, a fact and experience in surgery then entirely new, for which Doctor Dudley is entitled to the honor of discovery and demonstration. In the same paper is communicated a novel and successful method of treatment of fungus cerebri, by means of dried sponge compresses. Doctor Dudley stated that by this means he had cured fungus cerebri within the space of five days. In a second paper, in the next number of this volume, he gives an original and successful operation for hydrocele. In the fourth number he began an extensive article on his peculiar uses of the roller bandage in gunshot wounds, fractures, etc., which he continued through several volumes of the Journal. In the second volume he had given an interesting article on the use of the roller bandage in the treatment of ulcers, contusions, lacerations, effusions, etc. In the fifth volume he continued his remarks on epilepsy as treated by the trephine. In volume sixth he published a record of his experience in the treatment of Asiatic cholera in Lexington. In the ninth he continued his observations on the bandage and its very successful application in the treatment of fractures. A most interesting and valuable article on Calculous Diseases from his pen appeared in the same volume, illustrating not only his great practical skill but his courage and quick and clear judgment in cases of emergency. Volumes ten and twelve contained reports of his operations in lithotomy; volume eleven, a paper on Fractures and Calculous Diseases. In the elegant and generally correct Memoir of Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, published by the late Lunsford P. Yandell, M. D., in the American Practitioner, 1870, these are stated to be the only writings of our late distinguished surgeon; but Doctor Dudley subsequently published three elaborate and highly valuable surgical papers, to wit: 1. On the Treatment of Aneurism, published in the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, edited by Professor Ethelbert L. Dudley, July, 1849. 2. On the Treatment of Gunshot Wounds. Ibid., December, 1849. 3. On the Treatment of Fractures by the Roller Bandage. Ibid., 1850. This journal was a bi-weekly publication, the successor of the old Transylvania Medical Journal above mentioned. These were the latest productions of Doctor B. W. Dudley. Engaged as he continually was in a daily round of engrossing surgical and medical practice, lecturing twice a day in the Medical School during its sessions, there was left to him but little time for the record or promulgation of his ample experience by his pen. As a medical practitioner also he was original. He was among the first to discard the lancet in his treatment of disease. He used instead small doses of tartar emetic, or more recently, of ipecacuanha frequently repeated, with low diet; or cholagogue purgatives combined with ipecacuanha, etc. He confined himself to but few medicines, but in the application of these, and of diet and regimen, his clear and correct judgment was usually apparent. Polypharmacy he despised. New remedies were looked upon by him with incredulity and suspicion. Quinine, iodine, and other novelties in his time never were accorded approbation by him. As a man and a citizen he was eminently liberal, charitable, magnanimous, public-spirited, and energetic. He bound his friends to him with the strongest ties and treated his hostile enemies—who were few—with a cordial hatred. His sense of honor and personal dignity was very delicate and high. No one so deeply despised a mean action. No one so readily forgave an injury which was confessed. An exemplification of his character was given in 1817–18. A difficulty having originated between himself and Doctor Drake, in relation to the resignation of the latter and some matters connected with a post-mortem examination of an Irishman who had been killed in a quarrel, sharp pamphlets passed between them and a challenge to mortal combat from Dudley to Drake, which the latter declined, but which was vicariously accepted by his next friend, Doctor William H. Richardson. A duel resulted in which, at the first fire, Richardson was seriously wounded in the groin by the ball of Dudley, severing the inguinal artery. Richardson would have speedily bled to death—as it could not be controlled by the tourniquet—but for the ready skill and magnanimity of Dudley. He immediately asked permission of his adversary to arrest the hemorrhage, and by the pressure with his thumb over the ilium gave time for the application of the ligature by the surgeon of Richardson—thus converting his deadly antagonist into a lifelong friend. Notwithstanding Doctor Dudley had contributed tens of thousands to public improvement and to private charities, and never regularly kept accounts against his patients, he acquired a considerable fortune. His latter days were passed in the society of his children and grandchildren in the household of his son, the late William A. Dudley, surrounded by all the comforts which a large competency and a devoted family could provide. Thus, in the quiet of domestic retirement, passed away the last days of a most active and eminently useful and distinguished life.[20]
The annals of the earlier efforts to establish medical education and a medical college in connection with Transylvania University—the first in the whole West and the second in the United States—are meager and unsatisfactory. As already stated, the first Medical Professors in this University—Doctors Samuel Brown and Frederick Ridgely (1799)—no doubt taught and lectured occasionally to such students as were present. The files of the old Kentucky Gazette show that Doctor James Fishback, who was unanimously appointed to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in Transylvania in 1805, advertised to lecture, and did probably lecture on these subjects. But he resigned in 1806. Doctor James Overton, who had been appointed to the chair of Materia Medica and Botany in 1809, said in his letter of acceptance (on the occasion of his reappointment in the reorganization of the Medical Faculty in 1817) that he "had engaged for some time in giving lectures on Theory and Practice in this town," etc. According to the best recollection of the late Doctor Coleman Rogers—for a long time before his death a resident in Louisville—the Medical College of Transylvania University was reorganized in 1815 by the appointment of the following Faculty: Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery. Doctor Coleman Rogers, adjunct to this chair. Doctor James Overton, Theory and Practice. Doctor William H. Richardson, Obstetrics, etc. Doctor Thomas Cooper (Judge Cooper), of Pennsylvania, to the chair of Chemistry, Mineralogy, etc. Doctor James Blythe, then acting President of the University, was to give chemical instruction. Doctor Cooper and Doctor Rogers did not accept this appointment. According to Doctor Rogers' recollection a regular course of lectures was not delivered by this Faculty, although Doctors Dudley and Overton probably both lectured or taught "as they previously had done."[21]Doctor Dudley's own recollection, as detailed to the present writer, was also that he and Doctor Overton, as well as Doctor Blythe, lectured in 1815–16 to about twenty students, of whom the late Doctor Ayres and the yet surviving Nestor of Transylvania graduates, Doctor Christopher C. Graham, of Louisville—now almost a centenarian[22]—were in attendance as pupils. Very little can now be ascertained, from existing records, of the character of Professor James Overton, M. D. Doctor Christopher C. Graham, in a recent letter to the writer, gives some of his reminiscences of him in the following language: "Doctor Overton was a small, black-eyed man, very hypochondrical and sarcastic (notoriously so), and yet quite chatty, humorous, and agreeable; telling his class many funny things.... He was well educated for his day and plumed himself especially on his Greek." Doctor Overton removed from Lexington to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1818.[23] DOCTOR JAMES OVERTON.
From a Portrait made in Philadelphia before 1815. The late Doctor Ayres, of Danville, and latterly of Lexington, informed the writer that, in 1815, Doctor Dudley, having recently returned from Europe, was invited by himself and other medical students to demonstrate to them in anatomy and surgery. Learning that he would lecture to them if a class were formed, they made up one of from twenty to twenty-five, and Doctor Dudley lectured to them on anatomy and surgery in "Trotter's Warehouse,"[24] a house situated on the south-east corner of Main and Mill streets, opposite the site[25] of the old original Lexington block-house. In the next winter, he recounts, he lectured to about fifty or sixty students, some of whom were from Ohio. Doctors Overton and Blythe, one or both, also lectured in both winters. This may be said to be the real beginning of the successful career of the Medical Department of Transylvania University, and of that of Doctor Dudley as a medical professor. The Kentucky Gazette of March 10, 1817, contains a card published by a committee of the medical students of Transylvania, signed David J. Ayres, Thomas J. Garden, and Charles H. Warfield (committee of the medical class), headed a "Tribute of Gratitude," in which they return grateful thanks to their professors, Doctors B. W. Dudley, James Overton, and the Reverend Doctor Blythe, for the ability, fidelity, and perseverance with which they had taught. A further proof that a medical session was held in the Transylvania School in 1816–17. Many circumstances in these early times favored the establishment of a medical college in Lexington. Not only had that city been recognized for many years as a great center of public education for the whole State—made so by the location in it of the State's University, "Transylvania"—but it was also at that time the great metropolis of the West. The country around it, though fast becoming settled and improved by enterprising pioneers, had not as yet been provided with roads, or good means of communication with older settlements. To ascend the Ohio River and cross the Alleghany Mountains to Philadelphia, where the only other medical school then existed, was a tedious and laborious undertaking, not devoid of danger.The celebrated French botanist, F. A. Michaux, who visited this country in 1802, was obliged to walk most of the way over the mountains to Pittsburg. Descending the Ohio River in a canoe and landing at Limestone (now Maysville), he consumed two days and a half on horseback on his journey from that place to Lexington, having been obliged to leave his baggage behind. The late Professor Charles Caldwell records, in his remarkable Autobiography, that as late as 1820, when he set out from Lexington for Europe to purchase books and apparatus for the Medical Department of Transylvania, he was compelled to travel from Lexington to Maysville on horseback, with his baggage on a pack-horse conducted by a servant on a third horse. "The animals were all powerful and active," but "so deep and adhesive was the mud that they did not reach Maysville—only sixty miles distant—until an early hour on the fourth day," although diligence on his part was not wanting. Students of this region had to overcome very great difficulties when they set out in search of instruction in the medical schools of Philadelphia. On March 2, 1816, one thousand dollars were appropriated by the Trustees of Transylvania and placed in the hands of Doctor Blythe and John D. Clifford for the immediate purchase of chemical apparatus. Doctor Blythe, who had been acting President of the University up to this time, resigned and accepted the position of Professor of Chemistry in the Medical Department. In 1817 the Medical Faculty was further reorganized by the appointment of the late celebrated, talented Doctor Daniel Drake to the chair of Materia Medica and Medical Botany. The organization was then as follows: Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery. Doctor James Overton, Professor of Theory and Practice. Doctor Daniel Drake, Professor of Materia Medica and Medical Botany. Doctor William H. Richardson, Professor of Obstetrics, etc. Doctor James Blythe, Professor of Chemistry, etc. Doctor Drake has stated that twenty pupils attended this course of lectures, and the degree of M. D. was—for the first time in Lexington—conferred on John Lawson McCullough of this city. Portrait of Doctor Richardson DOCTOR WILLIAM H. RICHARDSON.
From a Portrait by Jouett. Each professor lectured three times a week, and his ticket was fifteen dollars. During this session ill feelings arose between Doctors Dudley and Drake, leading to the duel between Doctors Dudley and Richardson already described.[26] Doctor Drake resigned his professorship and returned to Cincinnati at the end of this session, returning subsequently in 1823 to occupy the same chair, to resign it again in 1827. Professor Richardson did not lecture this session. He, not having yet received the degree of M. D., was allowed to be absent.[27]
Professor William Hall Richardson Taught in the Medical Department of Transylvania until the time of his death in 1844, and was highly respected by his pupils as a practical teacher in his especial chair, notwithstanding he had not the advantage of early educational training. He was a man of great energy and of many admirable traits of character. His pupil, the late Lewis Rogers, M. D., in his address as President of the Kentucky State Medical Society in 1873, thus spoke of his old preceptor and friend: "Few men ever had nobler traits of character. He was warm-hearted, brave, and a sincere friend. I knew him from my earliest boyhood, and have passed away many happy and instructive hours at his magnificent home in Fayette County.[28] His hospitality was profuse and elegant. I listened to his public teachings as a professor with interest and care, because I knew he taught the truth as far as he possessed it. He was not scholarly or graceful and fluent as a lecturer, but he was ardent and impressive, sufficiently learned in his special branch, and had at his command a large stock of ripe experience. I honor his memory beyond most men I have known." In 1819, a new and brilliant era for the University, and for the Medical Department of Transylvania, was inaugurated by the appointment of Reverend Horace Holley, LL. D., to the Presidency of the University. Doctor Samuel Brown was recalled to the chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, which he retained until 1825. Doctor Charles Caldwell was induced to remove from Philadelphia, where he had an official connection with the University of Pennsylvania, and to accept the chair of the Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica here, thus completing the organization with the existing professors, Benjamin W. Dudley and William H. Richardson, and the election of Reverend James Blythe to the chair of Chemistry. The celebrated naturalist, C. S. Rafinesque, was advertised to lecture on Botany and Natural History in this and the following year.[29]
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque,[30] A naturalist, antiquarian, etc., who stated in 1836 "that in knowledge he had been a botanist, naturalist, conchologist, zoologist, geographer, esentographer, physiologist, historian, antiquary, poet, philosopher, economist, and philanthropist; and by profession a traveler, merchant, manufacturer, collector, improver, professor, teacher, surveyor, draftsman, architect, engineer, author, editor, bookseller, librarian, secretary, chancellor, etc."—and believed he could have been any thing, as he "always succeeded in whatever he undertook." This statement gives a key to his life, which was one of great and untiring activity, as well as to his mental character, which enabled him to acquire the reputation of being one of the most learned men of his day. Born in Galata, Constantinople, the son of a merchant, in 1784, after living in France and Italy he came to America in 1802, returning to France in 1805, with a very large botanical collection. Spending ten years in Sicily in making natural history collections and writing various essays, he published in 1815 his Analysis of Nature. The same year he sailed for America, but was wrecked on Long Island, losing most of his collections and effects. Induced to come West from Philadelphia by John D. Clifford, of Lexington, in 1818, he was elected Professor of Botany and Natural History in Transylvania University in 1819, lectured to the students in the Medical College, was librarian, and taught French, Spanish, and Italian.[31] He also traveled and made collections in botany, natural history, etc., publishing various papers and pamphlets and preparing materials for his proposed great work, Tellus, or the History of the Earth and Mankind, Chiefly in America, of which in ten years he had, he said, prepared five thousand pages of manuscript and five hundred maps and figures. An idea of what this work might have been may be gathered from a remarkable essay—Ancient History or Annals of Kentucky—which was published in 1824 as an introduction to Marshall's History of Kentucky, in which, in twenty-eight small octavo pages, he professes to give not only the migrations, changes, filiations, annals, and descriptions of all the various tribes and peoples which inhabited Kentucky since the creation of man, but gives also a history of all the changes of geology and natural history, according to his views and in accordance with Mosaic cosmogony, substituting epochs for days, however. An essay which may be characterized as a very terse and dry recital of numerous doubtful statements, woven in a web of very audacious speculation. His success as a teacher in Transylvania was not great. He died in Philadelphia September 18, 1840, having published in 1836 his life, travels, and researches in North America and Europe from 1802 to 1835, and several small works on natural history, botany, etc. A project inaugurated by Rafinesque while professor in Transylvania was that of a botanic garden at Lexington called "The Botanical Garden of Transylvania University." A company was chartered by Act of Legislature January 7, 1824, with a capital stock of twenty-five thousand dollars, five hundred shares of fifty dollars each. William H. Richardson, President; Thomas Smith, Joseph Ficklin, John M. McCalla, Thomas L. Caldwell, Directors; William A. Leavy, Treasurer; C. S. Rafinesque, Secretary. Other members were William Leavy, senior, Elisha Warfield, J. Harper, James W. Palmer, Horace Holley, Charles Caldwell, Benjamin W. Dudley, Charles Humphreys, Gabriel Slaughter, Thomas Wallace, John Roche, Charles Wilkins, Benjamin Gratz, Richard Higgins, John W. Hunt, B. R. McIlvaine, Joseph Boswell, Samuel Brown, and Daniel Drake. We gather from the prospectus (1824) that this garden was intended to be a charming resort for the elite of Lexington, who were expected to stroll at eve, perchance, through sylvan bowers; it was also to benefit farmers and "the whole Western country" by supplying "the best kinds of fruit trees and grape vines, mountain rice, madder, senna, opium, ginseng, rhubarb, castor oil, new kinds of grain and pulse, etc." It was to be valuable especially to the medical students of Transylvania by affording opportunity to study the plants used in medicine. The single product of opium, it was judged, could be made to cover the annual expense of the garden. There was to be "a small but elegant building, with a portico, green-house, aviaries, bowers, museum, library, and many other suitable ornaments." Lectures and "practical demonstrations" were to be given there in Botany, Agriculture, Horticulture, Domestic Economy, etc. "Every individual admitted in the garden to hear a course of lectures" to pay "at least one dollar." To these ends a lot was procured on the south side of East Main Street,[32] within the city limits, and gardening operations commenced; but the garden was not a success. Though patronized for a time, as in duty bound, by its influential shareholders and diligently strolled in by the friends, principally, of the medical students, it was, after the departure from Lexington of Rafinesque, finally pronounced to be nothing more than a weed-patch and abandoned before any building was erected on it. In fact, from the testimony of old citizens, it would appear that no improvements were ever made there except the laying out of wide walks and the planting of various shrubs and wild flowers, chiefly such as were common upon the highways in Kentucky, but which unquestionably seemed remarkable to Rafinesque, who viewed them with the eye of a botanist exclusively. The organization of the Medical Faculty of 1819, already described, remained unchanged until 1823, when Doctor Daniel Drake was recalled to the chair of Materia Medica and Medical Botany, Doctor Caldwell retaining that of the Institutes of Medicine. The chair of Chemistry was also strengthened by the appointment of Doctor Robert Best[33] as adjunct professor, who resigned, however, at the end of two years. Doctor Drake was transferred in 1825 to the chair of Theory and Practice on the resignation of Doctor Samuel Brown, and Doctor Charles Wilkins Short was called to that vacated by Doctor Drake. Doctor Drake resigned finally in 1826, to be replaced by Doctor John Esten Cooke. We will not in this place note all the changes which occurred in the Faculty up to the time of its dissolution, but will append them in the form of a schedule. (See Schedule A.)
Daniel Drake, M. D. Doctor Drake DANIEL DRAKE, M. D. Born at Plainfield, New Jersey, October 20, 1785, and brought to Mason County, Kentucky, in 1788, was, in 1800, the first medical student in Cincinnati. He began to practice in 1804, when he was only nineteen years old. He spent the winter of 1805–6 as a student in Philadelphia, and the succeeding year in practice at his old home in Mayslick, removing for life to Cincinnati in 1807. He was made Professor of Materia Medica and Medical Botany in Transylvania University in 1817, but returned to Cincinnati to found the Medical College of Ohio in 1818, from which, however, his connection was suddenly severed, after a bitter controversy, May, 1822. He resumed a professorship at Lexington 1823–27, being Dean of the Faculty, and declined a chair in the University of Virginia in 1830. He accepted one in the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, 1830–31, and again in the Medical College of Ohio in 1831–32. He founded a new school as a department of Cincinnati College and taught in it 1835–39; was professor in the Louisville Medical Institute 1839–49, and afterward accepted a chair in the Medical College again in 1849–50. In 1827 he was editor of the Western Medical and Physical Journal, etc., but his chief work is his Treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of America, published in 1850—a wonderful tribute to American medical science. His contributions to scientific journals were numerous, and many of his medical lectures and scientific and historical addresses have been published.[34] He died at Cincinnati November 5, 1852, aged sixty-seven years.[35] Doctor David W. Yandell says: "As a lecturer Doctor Drake had few equals. He was never dull. His was an alert and masculine mind. His words are full of vitality. His manner was earnest and impressive. His eloquence was fervid." Soon after Doctor Yandell had entered the practice of medicine Doctor Drake told him: "I have never seen a great and permanent practice the foundations of which were not laid in the hearts of the poor. Therefore cultivate the poor. If you need another though sordid reason, the poor of to-day are the rich of to-morrow in this country. The poor will be the most grateful of all your patients. Lend a willing ear to all their calls."
Such enthusiasm in the establishment of the Medical Department of Transylvania existed at this time (1819) that liberal citizens of Lexington freely subscribed money to the amount of more than three thousand dollars to guarantee to Professors Caldwell and Brown each an annual sum of a thousand dollars for three years, and this salary was paid to them accordingly. Professor Caldwell visiting the Legislature of Kentucky in 1820, induced that body to give five thousand dollars for the express purpose of the purchase of books and apparatus for the Medical College in Transylvania University, which, as declared in the Act, was to remain "the property of the State of Kentucky." Moreover, the city of Lexington at the same time loaned to the college, for the same specified purpose, six thousand dollars, reserving a lien on the books. This loan subsequently became a donation. In addition many physicians of the South, of Kentucky, and of Lexington made further subscriptions, making altogether a gross sum of about thirteen thousand dollars, with which Professor Caldwell was enabled to purchase in Europe, in 1820, the foundation of the library, apparatus, and museum of the Medical Department.[36] Again, in 1827, certain citizens of Lexington and medical professors, forming a joint-stock company, furnished the means to build the first Medical Hall for the special uses of this department, on which, until 1839, when a new Medical Hall was erected, the medical professors paid an annual interest of six per cent on the cost. This old hall stood, before it was destroyed by fire (in 1854, while being used as a City Hall, etc.), on the site of the Lexington City Library, corner of Market and Church streets. It is thus described in the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, Volume I, 1828: "This building, a vignette view of which is seen on the cover of this Journal, was erected by the private munificence of citizens of Lexington during the last season. The corner-stone was laid with Masonic ceremonies on the fifteenth day of April, and the edifice was complete and in readiness for the reception of the medical class at the commencement of the session the first of November. "In an excavation made in the corner-stone was deposited a glass bottle enclosing a parchment roll on which were written the name of the President of the United States, those of the heads of departments, the Trustees of Transylvania University, the medical professors, trustees of the town, officers of the Grand Lodge who assisted at the ceremony, building committee, architect, etc. On a marble tablet over the front door of the house is the following inscription: COLL. TRANSYL. MEDIC.
FUND. A. D. MDCCCXVII. "Though plain and unostentatious, the style of its architecture is chaste and neat, its execution is solid and substantial, and its interior arrangements are of the most convenient, comfortable, and commodious kind. "The basement story of the building is chiefly appropriated to the chemical professorship and contains a lecture-room forty-five by fifty feet in dimensions, in which the seats and lecturing stand are arranged in the best manner for perfect vision, a lobby, an anti-room, a chemical laboratory well supplied with all necessary apparatus, and a dormitory for a resident pupil who acts as librarian. "These in connection with the very handsome and commodious anatomical amphitheater which was built during the preceding season, together with its preparing- and dissecting-rooms, present a suit of lecture-rooms, apartments, etc., not surpassed in point of excellence of light for demonstration, or in ease, comfort, and convenience to the pupil by any similar institution in America. The whole is situated in a pleasant and central part of the town, easily accessible from the chief boarding-houses in the worst weather."[37] [38] From the time of the reorganization in 1819, the classes in the Medical College increased rapidly—from only twenty, with a single graduate in 1817–18, to two hundred students and fifty-six graduates in the session of 1823–24. A rapid increase in patronage almost unparalleled in the history of medical schools, owing, no doubt, largely to the great increasing demand for medical instruction in this fast improving country and to the temporary extreme difficulty of the journey to the great medical school of Philadelphia, but also to the eclat of the University under the administration of Doctor Holley,[39] to the just fame of Doctor Dudley as a surgeon and medical teacher, to the reputation of Doctor Samuel Brown as a popular and cultivated physician and professor, and to the brilliant and popular talents of Doctor Charles Caldwell.
Doctor Charles Caldwell. The association of this distinguished professor with the fortunes of the Medical Department of Transylvania, which extended from 1819 to 1837, marked the era of its most rapid development, and embraced a large portion of the time of its greatest prosperity. The life, character, and writings of Doctor Caldwell are no doubt now well known to the medical profession through the numerous biographical notices which have appeared, especially those by the late Professor Lunsford P. Yandell, M. D., in Lindley's Medical Annals of Tennessee, and as amplified in the Transactions of the Kentucky State Medical Society in its twenty-first annual session in 1876, and other published sketches. But it may also be studied in his somewhat unfortunate Autobiography, which was published in Philadelphia in 1855, two years after his death, edited by the sister of his widow, Miss Harriet W. Warner. It is said of Titian, that when in his old age he took it into his head to improve some of his best pictures by retouching them, his judicious pupils mixed his paints with olive oil so they would not dry and could be easily washed off again, thus restraining him from marring or destroying his finest works and his fame together. Fortunate would it have been for the venerable Doctor Caldwell had much of this senile production—written only seven or eight years before his death—been canceled by a friendly hand. The too harsh criticisms in which he indulged, which placed some of his late colleagues sharply on the defensive and which also gave them powerful weapons of offense, as well as defense, had then been suppressed! On Page 315 of this autobiography he characterized the time-honored maxim, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," as "an ill-founded and dangerous precept." Hence Doctor Yandell, whom he had denounced in this work in the most opprobrious terms, felt justified in his notice of this autobiography in his paper on the Medical Literature of Kentucky, published in the Transactions of the Kentucky State Medical Society, 1876, Page 62, in the following terms: "It is not only egotistical and vainglorious beyond anything, I believe, to be found in the English language, but it is at the same time defamatory. The author holds himself up to admiration on all occasions and everywhere from boyhood to old age a very hero of romance." And literal quotations from the unfortunate volume give support to these allegations. Doctor Caldwell CHARLES CALDWELL, M. D. Under the provocation of Doctor Caldwell's posthumous attack, Doctor Yandell defended himself and retorted with the weapons which Doctor Caldwell himself had supplied. But, in later years, not long before his death, Doctor Yandell expressed to the writer, in a friendly letter, something like regret that he had not in this case adhered more closely to that maxim in relation to the dead, above quoted, which Doctor Caldwell had condemned as "ill-founded and dangerous." It must be admitted, however, that the provocation was great.[40] Doctor Caldwell was born, the youngest son of a large family, May 14, 1772, in Caswell County, North Carolina, and died in Louisville July 9, 1853, in his eighty-third year. His parents had emigrated from Ireland. His father—who was described by Doctor James Blythe, who knew him, as "very poor, and very, very pious"—destined Charles for the Presbyterian ministry. Accordingly he was measurably released from the labor of the farm on which the family lived and was allowed to pursue his studies in a solitary log hut which he had built for himself for the purpose—"his books his chief companions." He says he commenced to learn the ancient languages at twelve, and was already principal of a literary academy at eighteen. He says further of himself: "From an early period of my life I was actuated by a form of ambition and a love of disquisition and mental contest, which not only marked in me somewhat of a peculiarity of native mind and spirit, but tended also to strengthen them." In his subsequent life he delighted in debates, discussions, and mental contests. He acknowledges (Page 53) an early propensity to array himself in argument "on the wrong side of the question under consideration, in order the more certainly to produce discussion by my advocacy of a paradox, and to make a show of my ingenuity and ability in defense of error." But, as he acknowledged, "this kind of gladiatorship began to blunt his appreciation of truth as distinguished from error, and hence he endeavored to restrain this impulse"—not always successfully, perhaps. Although his taste and talents inclined him to the legal profession he was induced to study medicine, somewhat against his own judgment. His medical education was obtained in Philadelphia, in the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, then the only medical college in America, which he entered in 1792, and from which he graduated. While there he industriously employed his time and faculties in study, debate, and discussion, and his pen in numerous publications, the principal of which was a translation of Blumenbach's Elements of Physiology—which he completed before graduation. He managed to antagonize, amongst many others, his medical preceptor, the celebrated Doctor Rush, much to his own detriment, as he in his autobiography acknowledges. In the following year, 1793, on the outbreak of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, he distinguished himself by his courage and self-sacrifice in voluntarily attending and nursing the sick. And again, by his pen and otherwise, in theoretical discussions on the origin of the pestilence. According to his own representations and the testimony of his friends, he was exceedingly methodical in his habits, dividing his time with rigorous system; but we may well feel a little skeptical as to his assertion that he "rarely slept more than four hours," and at one time but three hours and a half. His mental activity and labor, however, in his youth, must have been very great. Apart from his necessary studies and his active and constant participation in the discussions of the Medical Society, he delivered more public addresses, for the Society and on other occasions, "than all the other members of the institution united" (Page 254), besides employing his pen in numerous ephemeral productions for the press. In speaking of his early life in Philadelphia (Page 330) he says: "I was a young man for the scenes in which I had acted; proud and ambitious certainly, and probably not altogether untinctured with vanity.... In truth it is hardly to be denied that, for a time at least, I was somewhat spoiled [by the compliments paid him] on account of my attributes and performances, both mental and corporal.... No wonder, therefore, that I felt, or conceited I felt, a decided superiority to most medical pupils, as well as the ordinary cast of young physicians.... I certainly did both indulge and manifest it to the extent, at times, of giving serious offense." This was not the worst. His bold self-confidence and assertion having placed him in a position of antagonism toward his friend and preceptor, Doctor Rush, as well as toward other influential medical men of Philadelphia, defeated the great ambition of his life—that of occupying the chair of the Institutes of Medicine in the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania. When informed by Doctor Rush (Page 290, autobiography) that although his friends spoke in flattering terms of "your talents, attainments, and powers in lecturing and instruction ... they are reluctant to recommend you to the Board of Trustees in the light of a professor," he indignantly declared that "if the door of the University of Pennsylvania was thus closed to him he would soon occupy a chair equally honorable with that of Doctor Rush in some other school." And he shortly thereafter was induced to push his fortunes in the great and growing West. Coming to Lexington with his shining and commanding talents, his determination to conquer success, and the brilliant reputation he then had as an independent writer and lecturer; to become associated with the yet more brilliant President Holley, and the already well-known and appreciated medical teachers, Doctors Dudley and Brown; at an auspicious time when the rapidly improving country felt the want of medical instruction at home—the rapid success of the Medical Department of Transylvania (to which he materially contributed by his able efforts before the public) might well excuse him in his belief[41] that he had come to Lexington to be the "premier of the school,"[42] that he had come to train and induct his colleagues ("a most miserable Faculty," he calls them) into efficiency and fame, and that the success of medical education in Lexington was due mainly to his individual efforts. Candor obliges us to admit, however, that there is some truth in the statement of the late Professor Yandell, in the memoir above quoted. Doctor Yandell was a student in the Medical Department of Transylvania in 1823, and a most ardent admirer of the brilliant talents of Professor Caldwell, yet he found that both Professors Dudley and Drake were more popular with the students, as teachers, than he. He says (Page 56): "Students, in truth, generally turned listlessly away from his polished discourses on Sympathy, Phrenology,[43] the Vital Principle, and other kindred themes, and hurried off to the lectures on Materia Medica and Anatomy."[44] In short, Doctor Caldwell excelled in the brilliant discussion of speculative and theoretical subjects. The extent of his positive knowledge, as remarked by Doctor Yandell, was greater in superficial area than in depth; whilst in the terse and lucid exposition of definite facts, which characterized the instruction of Professor Dudley, the student felt he was acquiring knowledge which not only was real but was of practical utility. The history of the rise and fall of this school of medicine is illustrated in the detailed list of its classes and graduates as shown in the annexed Schedule B.The total number of students in the Medical School of Transylvania during the term of its existence was, as far as can now be ascertained, more than six thousand four hundred (6,456); the total number of its medical graduates eighteen hundred and eighty-one (1,881).[45] During the late civil war the commodious Medical Hall of Transylvania, built in 1839 by the munificence of the city of Lexington, and which had been seized by the United States Government for use as a United States General Hospital, was destroyed by fire while occupied for that purpose.[46] But the medical library,[47] apparatus and museum, etc., were mainly preserved, and are now in the custody of the Curators of Kentucky University, with which institution old Transylvania University was consolidated in 1865, "all the trusts and conditions" of her property being preserved in the Act of Consolidation. The Medical Department may yet be resuscitated when in the course of events our city again becomes an eligible site for modern medical instruction, and when special means can be obtained properly to equip and re-establish it on a basis suited to the existing times.The gradual decline of this school, like its rapid rise, was due greatly to the changing conditions of the country. When, shortly after 1812, steamboat navigation began to manifest its superiority and influence on the channels of commerce, population and business deserted measurably the interior routes and locations and transferred themselves to the river valleys and neighborhoods. Gradually during this change—notwithstanding the talents, ability, and fame of our Brown, Dudley, Caldwell, Cooke, Short, Yandell, Bartlett, Mitchell, Smith, and others, and the generous support of the city—the school declined; more especially because of the establishment of rival colleges at more eligible points, in growing and populous cities. Lexington lost its pre-eminence as the "Metropolis of the Western Country," and Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and other places which had been villages supplied with her manufactures, rapidly became great cities; while she declined from a population of about eight thousand in 1814, down to a little over four thousand in 1820, with an immense loss to her citizens in the value of her property and the destruction of her industries. In this year (1820) the population of Cincinnati, which in 1810 had been only two thousand, three hundred and twenty, had risen to nine thousand, six hundred and forty-four; and in 1830, when the population of Lexington was yet only five thousand, six hundred and sixty-two, that of Cincinnati was twenty-four thousand, eight hundred and thirty-one. When the present writer came to Lexington in 1832 the population had remained nearly the same, and an era of decrepitude and decline of all her industries still prevailed. Lexington had not yet finished her first railroad. This railroad, the "Lexington & Ohio," was begun in 1831 and completed as far as Frankfort—twenty-eight miles—in 1835. It was composed of stone sills laid side by side, with a dressed surface on the portion upon which the wheels were to run. The cars resembled an old pattern of street car and were drawn by horses. The imposing ceremony of laying the first "stone sill" took place on Water Street, October 21, 1831, "amid a vast throng of people." Indeed, it was made a very great occasion, which might have been marked with still greater pomp and circumstance, as the newspapers inform us, had "more notice been given beforehand." As it was, a large procession, civic and military, was formed, marshaled by General Leslie Combs, the renowned "boy-captain of 1812," assisted by handsome James B. Coleman. Three military companies, including "Hunt's Artillery" and "Captain Neet's Rifle Guards," were on parade with a fine military band playing "Yankee Doodle," "Hail, Columbia," and other patriotic airs. Major-General Pendleton and staff, on horseback, led the march. Governor Metcalfe and Reverend Nathan H. Hall supported the orator of the day. The Trustees of the town, the President and Directors of the railroad, the President and all the officers and Trustees of Transylvania University, and all the societies of the University and of the town, were in line. "At eleven o'clock," says the Lexington Reporter, "the three military companies which formed the escort marched from the place of rendezvous to the college lawn, where they were met by the various societies and individuals. For many years we have not witnessed such a pageant, and never a more interesting. "The procession first moved in a circle around the lawn where it was formed, at which time the bells in the various churches in town commenced a merry peal which continued till the procession reached the place where the ceremony was performed. The military escort then formed a hollow square, within which the whole civic procession was enclosed. Thousands of anxious and delighted spectators were on the outside, among whom we were gratified to see a large concourse of ladies, for whose accommodation the marshal had directed the adjacent market-house to be appropriated."Doctor Caldwell then delivered a highly interesting and appropriate address. "A Federal salute was fired at sunrise, and seven guns when the first stone sill was laid, indicating the seven sections of the road under contract." Doctor Caldwell spoke in polished and eloquent phrase of the advantages accruing to Lexington and the whole adjacent country from the establishment of this road. He prophesied also great benefit to Louisville therefrom. We learn from the same old newspaper that Doctor Caldwell was announced to deliver a lecture, a few evenings later, at the first meeting of the "Lexington Lyceum," at the court house. The subject of the lecture was "The Moral and Incidental Influences of Railroads." "Ladies and strangers" were invited to attend. But in later days, in competition with the steamboat, the newer and swifter mode of transportation—the railroad—has been gradually but surely restoring to the inland regions, and to Lexington, their lost prosperity. Our city has steadily risen to about seventeen thousand (1873), with a good prospect of a further increase of prosperity and population as railroads centering here may be extended. Then may we hope to put into active operation once more our time-honored Medical College, and to attract to it a creditable number of students. More particularly if, with the co-operation of the more enlightened members of our profession, an effort be faithfully made in the renovated college to bring about the much-needed reform in medical education, the necessity for which is now generally recognized. So that the mere fact of a student attending two courses of lectures, with other somewhat easy requisitions, may not entitle him to the degree of Doctor of Medicine, as has been too frequently the case amongst competing medical colleges. That full preparation and training, in a sufficient period of time, shall be required of the candidates into whose hands the health and lives of communities are to be committed. On such a basis—when our city may have acquired increased facilities for clinical instruction, and when anatomical studies will not be cramped for want of means of demonstration—the old Medical College of Transylvania may revive under the wing of a people's educational institution such as Transylvania is and always was—a "State University." Difficulties in the procurement of a sufficient supply of material for anatomical instruction, coupled with the demand for clinical teaching which was beginning to be urged by the profession, forced themselves on the attention of the Medical Faculty of Transylvania before the year 1836–37. But in that year a determined effort was made, engineered and led by Professor Caldwell, to remove the Medical College to Louisville, that city having been induced by the earnest and eloquent appeals of Caldwell to offer it a large bonus. But for the early withdrawal of Doctor Dudley from this promising scheme, toward which he was at first inclined—because mainly of his difficulties in the supply of anatomical material—it would have been successful. But Doctor Dudley finally declined to remove, much to the mortification of Doctor Caldwell, who, in his last valedictory to the graduates of 1837, indulged in a very bitter impersonal-personal tirade against deception and mendacity, aimed at Doctor Dudley—not saying openly to his colleague "thou art the man"—but hoping "the cap would fit him" and find its place. The Trustees of the University, of course, and influential citizens, violently opposed the proposed change. Doctor Caldwell was arraigned before the Board on charges preferred by Doctor Dudley, the principal of which was that he had been engaged in the enterprise of originating a rival medical college in Louisville while he was yet a professor in the Transylvania College and under oath to support it. Doctor Caldwell, disdaining to answer the summons of the Board, was, after a long and full investigation of the evidence, dismissed from his chair in Transylvania. The Medical Faculty was then dissolved and reorganized.[48] Doctors Cooke and Yandell, and finally Doctor Short, joined Doctor Caldwell to aid in the establishment of the Louisville Medical Institute. Professors Dudley and Richardson and the assistant professors, Bush and Peter, remained in Lexington. The celebrated Professor John Eberle was called to the chair of Theory and Practice, but he died shortly after the delivery of his introductory lecture. Professor Thomas D. Mitchell was appointed to the chair of Chemistry, etc., and Doctor James C. Cross to that of the Institutes of Medicine.[49]
Doctor John Esten Cooke Removed from Virginia in 1827 to fill the chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in Transylvania University, which had just been vacated by Doctor Drake. He had already acquired a high reputation as a practitioner of medicine; he had published an able essay on autumnal fever in the Medical Recorder for 1824, and had in the same year produced the first volume of his very remarkable Treatise on Pathology and Therapeutics, the second volume of which he published in Lexington in 1828. The promised third volume, which was to complete the work, never appeared. He remained in Transylvania Medical School until 1837, when, under the leadership of Doctor Caldwell, he with Doctor Yandell, removed to Louisville to engage in originating a new medical college, the "Louisville Medical Institute." In this and in its successor, the "Medical Department of the Louisville University," he remained until a few years before his death, which occurred on his farm on the Ohio River above Louisville, October 19, 1853, in the seventy-first year of his age. DOCTOR JOHN ESTEN COOKE.
From a Photograph. Doctor Cooke was in many respects a remarkable man, who acquired a widespread reputation in this country, especially in the Mississippi Valley. His fame was mainly built on his celebrated theory of the universal origin of disease, which was, that disease was caused by cold or malaria. That especially it commenced in weakened action of the heart, resulting in congestion of the vena cava, its branches and capillary distribution, and that fever was but the reaction of the vital force to overcome this condition, which unrelieved would result in death. According to him, all autumnal and malarial fevers were but variations of one diseased condition, and even those fearful scourges the plague, cholera, yellow fever, dysentery, etc., were simply varied forms and conditions of congestion of the vena cava. To destroy this many-headed hydra—while he would use cold water to reduce too great febrile excitement and even sometimes give antimonial wine[50]—his main reliance was on blood-letting and cholagogue purgatives, as he believed it was by increasing the secretion of the liver and causing it to pour out consistent "black bile" that the venous congestion was to be relieved and the patient cured. Amongst all these remedies calomel was his chief reliance, and was given by him in doses not measured by the balance but by the effect they produced; so that in the latter days of practice—notably during the epidemic of cholera in Lexington in 1833—he absolutely resorted to tablespoonful doses of this mercurial, repeated pro re nata; actually giving about one pound in one day to a young patient, without fatal result. Two cases may be quoted from his own paper in the Transylvania Medical Journal, and from Doctor Yandell's Memoir of Doctor Cooke in the American Practitioner for July, 1875. "William Douglass, a student of theology, nineteen years of age, took a tablespoonful (about two ounces) every six hours for three days in succession, having taken the same quantity the evening before; in all, thirteen tablespoonfuls. He was in collapse when he took the first dose. On the third morning after beginning this treatment his discharges were found to have become thick and green, and Doctor Cooke thought he would have recovered but for the indiscretion of his attendant, who had him to walk across a large room from one bed to another more than once. Hiccough came on, the patient became delirious, and died on the sixth day. But another patient recovered about this time under similar treatment, and still lives, I believe—a useful Episcopal clergyman, and an illustration of the extent to which calomel may be employed in some diseases without injury to health. Mr. Brittan, a young theological student, took a tablespoonful of calomel soon after having had several copious watery discharges. He was advised to repeat the dose every six hours, until the watery discharges ceased. He took, that day, four and on the next, three of these doses; the discharges not ceasing until some time after the seventh dose had been taken. He took, moreover, three similar doses during the same time—having thrown up three. The repeated doses were given immediately after the regular ones were thrown up. Bilious discharges appeared on the evening of the second day, and were kept up by tincture of aloes and occasionally pills of aloes and rhubarb for a week. The patient was somewhat salivated, but recovered. I saw him a number of years afterwards in perfect health." Doctor Yandell asserts in this memoir that in this "extraordinary practice, Doctor Cooke was not less successful in the treatment of cholera than his medical brethren in Lexington." But the fact was that none were very successful and that as many as fifty died in a day of a population of a little over six thousand.[51] The writer recollects that Doctor Cooke only practiced in the earlier period of this famous epidemic, having been disabled by a fall in attempting, in his hurry to attend a professional call, to put on his coat while running down stairs. In another case of cholera which occurred at this time, as the present writer was informed by the intelligent and truthful brother of the young lady patient of Doctor Cooke, these large tablespoonful doses passed through the bowels apparently unchanged, being discharged in lumps as large as pullets' eggs, without being even dissolved. This patient did not recover. Calomel is well known to be practically insoluble in pure water at the common temperature. It is decomposed to a certain extent by the action of light, or by a moderate heat in the presence of water, and especially by the aid of acids of various kinds, and by certain salts such as alkaline and other soluble chlorides—especially potassium, sodium, and ammonium chlorides. In all these cases of partial decomposition some of the mercurous chloride—the calomel—is changed into soluble mercuric chloride and metallic mercury. This decomposition is supposed to result from the action of the alkaline chlorides and the chloro-hydric and other acids of the gastric juice when calomel is taken into the stomach under ordinary circumstances. It is believed that the activity of the calomel depends mainly on the amount of this decomposition which takes place in the body. Especially does this partial decomposition of calomel into corrosive sublimate occur, to a great extent, when it is mixed in water with sal-ammoniac (ammonium chloride), as has been experienced in cases of poisoning by the administration of even moderate doses of calomel which had been mixed with this salt. In an experiment by the present writer in which three tenths of a gram of calomel and one and two tenths of a gram of sal-ammoniac with ten grams of water were allowed to react at the common temperature for twenty-four hours, as much as 0.019 of a gram of corrosive sublimate was found. No doubt these facts throw much light on the very irregular action of calomel in different persons and under various conditions, in doses which may be very small or very large. We can easily understand how, when the stomach secretes no gastric juice and when the salts of the blood have been greatly reduced in quantity by watery purging as in cholera, the calomel may pass through the alimentary canal unchanged, insoluble and inactive, or exert a doubtful topical action only. The present writer's own experience—when he was a medical student, and when fully impressed by the sincere and logical teachings of Doctor Cooke, who, however halting and hesitating may have been his manner or unadorned his style of lecturing, always commanded the fixed attention and highest respect of his pupils—soon opened his eyes to the faults in the theory of the professor. On one occasion, having been brought into a somewhat febrile condition by fatigue in a botanical excursion in hot weather, and having full faith in the statements of Doctor Cooke to the effect that calomel was of all antifebrile remedies the best, and that while a small dose of calomel might prove irritating a good large dose "would sometimes act like an opiate," he took a one drachm dose in full confidence. But instead of the soothing, curative effect he had been led to expect, vomiting and severe irritation of the stomach resulted, so much so that no food but boiled milk could be tolerated for a week or so afterward. Shaken in his faith by his first experience, but not yet convinced of the error of the doctrine of his respected preceptor, the second trial of a drachm dose on a similar occasion completely satisfied him that something wrong had crept into the theory and practice of the honored professor. Doctor Cooke's only fear in his heroic use of calomel was that it would salivate. But for this untoward influence, he said, one might do almost anything with it. That this substance which, in cases of cholera, he administered so largely with no signs of irritation or salivation, until the patient was in a convalescent state, should sometimes in much smaller doses prove an irritant poison, he did not understand. A quotation from Doctor Yandell's Memoir, Page 7, illustrates this: "In some cases of fever Doctor Cooke administered a drachm of calomel at a dose, and repeated it until the patient had taken in twenty-four hours as much as two hundred and forty grains. A young lady was thus treated in 1826. After this quantity had been given she seemed much relieved, but to avert the danger of salivation he thought it prudent to administer jalap and cream of tartar. At night they were thrown up, without producing any purgative effect. She then took a drachm of calomel, and repeated it until she had taken five doses in the course of the night and morning, with the same fine effect in producing abundant bilious discharges, and a remarkably good effect on the symptoms generally." Still uneasy about ptyalism, he gave her cream of tartar all day, but at night it was thrown up as before, without moving the bowels. "My fears of the consequence of giving the only medicine which offered any prospect of saving her," he adds, "held my hand, and she continued to vomit till death relieved her. I reproached myself on her account afterward, and felt conscious that fear of a remote and uncertain evil had induced me to stand and see her die without doing all I might have done. I was convinced she would not have died had the calomel been continued." After she had thus taken more than an ounce of calomel he honestly believed that he had not given her enough of this medicine! Entirely ignoring the action of the cream of tartar in bringing this substance partly into the condition of a soluble irritant poison! To convince myself of this decomposing action of cream of tartar on calomel, I placed about a drachm of calomel in each of two small beaker glasses. In the one I put pure distilled water, in the other I added to the water about a drachm of cream of tartar. Heating them to about blood heat and allowing them to stand for a few hours, I filtered both liquids from the undissolved calomel. Ammonium sulphide, added to the filtered fluids, threw down from that which contained the cream of tartar a sensible amount of dark mercurial sulphide, while that which contained pure water gave no notable reaction. Evidently the cream of tartar had caused the decomposition of some of the insoluble calomel and had produced a soluble mercurial compound. All soluble compounds of mercury are active poisons in small doses, while, as was fully proven by Doctor Cooke's extraordinary practice with this substance, pure unchanged calomel is one of the most insoluble substances. Consequently it sometimes proved harmless in very large doses, as was the case when the copious watery discharges of cholera had removed most of the salts of the blood. The Doctor took no note of possible agencies which might make his master remedy occasionally poisonous, and scouted the careful practice of some of the older physicians in causing their patients to abstain from the use of common salt while taking calomel, a recommendation based upon valid experience, no doubt, which science has verified. The Doctor rose to two ounces, or tablespoonful doses, during the prevalence of Asiatic cholera in Lexington, but he did not confine this treatment to that fearful disease. The present writer has preserved one of the last of his mammoth doses—one of a dozen of the same weight (about an ounce)—which he prescribed for a medical student of the session of 1836–37, the subject of pneumonia, and who took eleven such doses in regular succession before he died. In Doctor Cooke's earlier practice, and in the treatment of less severe cases, he relied greatly on his famous pills—well known in the region of Lexington as "Cooke's Pills"—composed of equal parts of calomel, aloes, and rhubarb; or on tincture of aloes and the lancet, with the occasional use of a few other remedies. These constituted his sole armament with which to encounter disease. For he was a man of the strictest and most earnest honesty, sincerity, and zeal, and withal so wedded to his logical convictions that he would at any time have died a martyr to his well-matured beliefs. Indeed, according to the testimony of his friend, the late Lunsford P. Yandell, he seems thus to have been to some extent a martyr to his own theory and practice. On Page 22 of Doctor Yandell's Memoir of Doctor Cooke, we are informed that "his practice on himself was of the same heroic character that he pursued with his patients. He bled himself at once copiously and repeated the operation again and again as symptoms appeared to him to demand it, at the same time keeping up purgation with calomel. Exposed as he was on his farm, these attacks became frequent and his constitution, naturally enfeebled by increasing years, at length gave way under them." Again, on Page 27 of the same Memoir, Doctor Yandell says: "The perfect sincerity with which he held his opinions was evinced by his carrying out his practice in his own case. On one occasion this was near costing him his life. He was seized with intermittent fever, on his farm near Louisville in the fall of 1844, and for several days took his pills—composed of calomel, rhubarb, and aloes—in the confident belief that they would arrest the disease; but the chills continued to recur with an increasing tendency to congestion until at last his case became alarming. His old friend, General Mercer, of Virginia, who happened to be on a visit to him at the time, called on me and gave me an account of his situation, asking me to visit him. Doctor Cooke was reluctant to take quinine, but finally consented and was relieved, and afterward, I believe, used the remedy in his practice." A characteristic anecdote is recorded of him in Collins' History of Kentucky. "One Sunday morning, waiting on some of his family to get ready for church—the Methodist church, of which he and they were members—he picked up a discourse by the Reverend Doctor Chapman, then Episcopal clergyman of Lexington. The argument for the Old Church of England attracted his attention. He perused and studied it fully, sent for all the available authorities on the subject; studied them with such effect that at once he changed his communion to the Episcopal Church and was ever after a rigid and zealous pillar to that church, and an industrious student of the writings of the theological fathers."His logic, on which he based his medical theory and practice, is most elaborately set forth in his only large work, already mentioned—A Treatise of Pathology and Therapeutics—and was tersely summed up by a most zealous believer and pupil of his[52] as follows: "If all diseases result from congestion of the vena cava, and if calomel is the best and most reliable remedy, what is the use of applying to any other means?" Because of its simplicity and its apparently logical basis, the system of Doctor Cooke was very attractive to students of medicine. If true—and they could not doubt it—it was a great new discovery of a royal road to medical practice which avoided all the drudgery over pathology, chemistry, the materia medica and therapeutics of the old school. All ordinary diseases were a unit produced by a common cause, and calomel was the principal panacea! But alas! the logical system of Doctor Cooke, like many other beautiful and well-laid superstructures, failed in this essential thing—the foundation on which it was raised was not true. Logical minds too often willingly lay down or accept assumptions, or uncertain facts, as axioms, and are satisfied if the deductions from these are logically accurate and perfect. Doctor Cooke, in a slow and laborious way, took infinite pains to build up his logical superstructure. The writer recollects his illustration of logical connections, by means of certain pieces of wood united by strings; and, notwithstanding his unadorned style and slow and hesitating manner, his students—carried away by his well-known truthfulness, sincerity, and earnest zeal, and incapable of judging for themselves of the validity of his premises—accepted his doctrine as a new revelation and were almost unanimously his ardent followers until experience or more ample knowledge opened their eyes to its faults. Before he removed from Transylvania School to the new one in Louisville in 1837, severe criticisms of his teachings had been published. Indeed it had begun to be believed by some that these teachings were marring the prosperity of that old college. Soon after his removal to Louisville, we are told by Doctor Yandell, "the current which from the first had set in against his theory and practice grew every year more formidable" until "assailed on all sides, and from within as well as from without, his theory steadily lost ground, his practice grew more unpopular and his influence as a teacher visibly declined from the day he began to lecture in Louisville."[53] So that in 1843 he was, on petition of the students, retired on a three years' pension of two thousand dollars per annum. Besides the two volumes of his Pathology and Therapeutics he published a small work on Autumnal Diseases, and a number of medical papers in The Transylvania Journal of Medicine, of which he was one of the original editors. The congestive theory of disease had its short day, like many others which have floated like bubbles on the stream of medical progress. We remember it as one of the curiosities of medical literature.[54]
Doctor Charles Wilkins Short Was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, at "Greenfields," October 6, 1794. He connected himself with the Medical Department of Transylvania University in 1825. He had been called by the Trustees in a previous year to the chair of Materia Medica and Medical Botany, but did not at once accept. Doctor Short was a most upright, conscientious, modest, undemonstrative gentleman of great delicacy of feeling. He was a most zealous and industrious botanist, and was possessed of artistic tastes and ability. One of his greatest pleasures was in his extensive herbarium, rich with the native plants of Kentucky collected by himself, as well as with those from other regions obtained by the exchange of specimens with the various botanists of the world, with whom he corresponded individually and extensively. He, in conjunction with Professors H. H. Eaton, H. A. Griswold, and R. Peter, contributed to the Transylvania Journal of Medicine several papers on the plants of Kentucky,[55] and wrote for that periodical several papers on this subject and on medical topics, as well as numerous obituary notices of medical men. He was not the author of any large treatise. In addition to his notices and catalogues of Kentucky plants he published in the Transylvania Medical Journal: "Instructions for Gathering and Preservation of Plants in Herbaria." "Botanical Bibliography." 1835. "A Brief Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of Cholera Asphyxia." 1835. "A Sketch of the Progress of Botany in Western America."In 1845, he wrote "Observations of the Botany of Illinois," published in the Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery. In the early volumes of the Transylvania Journal also appeared his notices of two remarkable cases which occurred in Lexington. One, of supposed spontaneous combustion of the human body, and the other of paralysis of the kidneys. At his death his vast collection of botanical specimens, in the formation of which he took such delight, and to which he had devoted so great a portion of his life, was bequeathed to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, but there was no appropriate place there in which to display so large a collection. It is now in possession of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia. During his life no less than five of the distinguished botanists of the age honored his name by attaching it to six new genera and species of plants. Doctor Short DOCTOR CHARLES WILKINS SHORT. His lectures to the medical students on Materia Medica and Medical Botany he always read from his manuscript, which detracted somewhat from his impressiveness. He was too modest to trust himself to oral discourses.[56] Yet his pupils were always closely attentive and respectful, holding him and his teachings in high esteem.[57] He was Dean of the Medical Faculty in Transylvania for about ten years. For some years he was co-editor of the Transylvania Journal of Medicine with Doctor Cooke. This quarterly they founded in Lexington in 1828. Doctor Short severed his connection with the Transylvania Medical School in 1838 to be allied with Doctors Caldwell, Cooke, and Yandell in the Medical Institute of Louisville,[58] in which he remained until 1849, when his colleagues elected him Emeritus Professor of Materia Medica and Botany. He died at his beautiful country residence, "Hayfield," near Louisville, on March 7, 1863, aged sixty-nine years. Doctor Short's father was Peyton Short, who came to Kentucky from Surry County, Virginia, and whose mother was Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Skipwith, Baronet. His mother was Mary, daughter of John Cleves Symmes, formerly of Long Island, who filled various offices of honor and trust in Cincinnati. His sister was the wife of Doctor Benjamin Winslow Dudley. His brother was the late Judge John Cleves Short, of North Bend, Ohio. He married Mary Henry Churchill, only daughter of Armistead and Jane Henry Churchill. Of his six children—one son and five daughters—all were prosperous in life. The early education of Doctor Short was in the school of the celebrated Joshua Fry, and, in 1810, he graduated with honor in the Academical Department of Transylvania University, beginning soon afterward the study of medicine with his uncle, Professor Frederick Ridgely. He repaired to Philadelphia in 1813 and became a private pupil of Doctor Casper Wistar, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Pennsylvania, in which university Doctor Short received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in the spring of 1815, returning shortly after to Kentucky. Doctor Short was a consistent member of the Presbyterian church.[59]
Professor Lunsford Pitts Yandell, Senior, M. D. Was called to the chair of Chemistry and Pharmacy in the Medical Department of Transylvania University, March 16, 1831.[60] He had attended the course of lectures in that school in 1822–23, having previously acquired a good general and classical education in the Bradley Academy, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and having studied medicine some time with his father, Doctor Wilson Yandell, a physician of high standing. While attending the lectures in the Transylvania Medical College he became favorably known as a young man of industry, good attainments, and ability, and of popular manners. Especially was he a favorite pupil of Professor Charles Caldwell, who became his ardent friend, and through whose active influence, mainly, he was called in 1831—after he had received the degree of M. D. from the University of Maryland—to occupy the Chemical chair in the Transylvania School. Although he had been a good and apt scholar in his preliminary education, he had never devoted especial attention to chemistry, which at that time, notwithstanding the neglect or opposition of the older medical teachers—notably the ridicule of Professor Caldwell and others—was beginning to be recognized as an essential element of a good medical education. This want of special training and experience in this branch of science on his part naturally caused opposition to his appointment to this chair, which was allayed by making the late Hezekiah Hulbert Eaton, A. M., professor adjunct to the Chemical chair, and giving him one third of the tuition fees. Professor Eaton was a young man of fine attainments and thorough practical training in chemistry and natural science generally; a graduate of Rensselaer Institute of Troy, New York, under the administration of his father, the celebrated Amos Eaton.[61] Adjunct Professor Eaton died of consumption at the age of twenty-three, before the end of the first year; but during the short term of his service he had, by his industry and practical knowledge, greatly improved the means of instruction in the Chemical Department by a complete reorganization of the laboratory and the procurement of much new apparatus, etc.[62] Doctor Yandell DOCTOR LUNSFORD P. YANDELL, SENIOR. After the death of Professor Eaton, August 16, 1832, the present writer, then residing in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, who had also been a student in the Rensselaer Institute and consequently known to Professor Eaton, was persuaded by the late Reverend Benjamin Orr Peers to visit Lexington, Kentucky, to deliver a course of chemical lectures in the Eclectic Institute, of which Mr. Peers was principal and of which young Professor Eaton had been a professor. During this course, in 1832, the writer was induced by Professor Yandell, by private arrangement, to assist him in his next course of lectures to the medical students of Transylvania and to commence the regular study of medicine with a view to graduation. Under this arrangement, which continued until the disruption of the Medical Faculty in 1837, Doctor Yandell, in his usual able and brilliant manner, delivered the chemical lectures to the students, while to the writer was committed the preparation and performance of the demonstrative experimental part. On his removal to Louisville in 1837, to join in the establishment of the rival school, the Louisville Medical Institute, Doctor Yandell taught in the combined chairs of Chemistry and Materia Medica, never failing ably and impressively to perform this arduous duty. Not having any particular taste for so severe a study as practical chemistry, although no one was more impressed with the philosophical beauty and wide practical value of the science, he naturally sought a transfer to a chair more congenial with his tastes and the character of his mind than that of chemistry. This, circumstances prevented until, in 1849, the Trustees of the school—having come to the conclusion that Professor Caldwell had become superannuated—placed Doctor Yandell in the chair of Physiology, for which subject he had a decided taste. This change procured him the animosity of his whilom friend, Doctor Caldwell, who, in his rather unfortunate Autobiography written in his last declining years, indulged in much bitter denunciation of his late colleague. It is much to the credit of Doctor Yandell that, although when this angry publication was fresh from the press he retaliated by showing in ample quotations from the Autobiography some of the weak points in Doctor Caldwell's character, he was disposed in following years, as the writer knows, to extend over these weaknesses the mantle of kindness. Doctor Yandell occupied this chair of Physiology with great credit until he resigned, in 1859, to accept a chair in the Medical School of Memphis, Tennessee. During the Civil War he devoted himself to hospital service. In 1862, he was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Memphis, and in 1864 was ordained pastor of the Dancyville Presbyterian church. He resigned his pastorship in 1867, and returned to Louisville to resume the practice of medicine, which he had never entirely abandoned during the whole of his professional life. While resident in Lexington he was for some years sole editor of the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, to which he contributed several able papers. In Louisville he was editor for some time of the Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, in both cases filling the editorial chair with characteristic activity and ability. He was always a contributor to the medical literature of his day in numerous papers, especially in biographical sketches and obituary memoirs of medical men of Kentucky and Tennessee, a more complete collection of which he was said to be preparing at the time of his last illness. He held a facile pen; few writers of our times have produced more classical and graceful essays. As a public speaker and lecturer he was ever impressive, graceful, and chaste. His social qualities made him always welcome and prominent in all public assemblies of his medical brethren. In 1872, he was elected President of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Louisville, and at the time of his death he was President of the Medical Society of Kentucky. His decease occurred February 4, 1878, in the seventy-third year of his age.
Doctor Robert Peter, Though of foreign birth, came of that same class of British ancestry which has given the United States her representative Americans, Virginia her great men, our own State her typical Kentuckians. Born at Launceston, Cornwall, January 21, 1805, he was a member of the Peter family of Devon and Essex, which produced in former times the remarkable Sir William Peter or Petre, to which has been ascribed the noted Hugh Peter or Peters, and from which collaterally are descended the present Lords Bathurst and Petre. Robert Peter came to America with his parents, Robert and Johanna Dawe Peter, and their six other children, when twelve years old, landing at Baltimore and later settling at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The father, it seems, succeeded in none of his money-making enterprises in the new country, and Robert had early to support himself and to contribute something to the maintenance of the family. He was placed in Charles Avery's wholesale drug store at Pittsburg and there received a first-rate business education, while diligently cultivating his decided taste for chemistry. In 1828, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. The same year, after attending one session (by especial request) at the Rensselaer Institute Scientific School at Troy, New York, he acquired the title of "Lecturer on the Natural Sciences,"[63] and delivered a course of chemical lectures to a small class in Pittsburg, was a member of the Hesperian Society and contributed to its organ, The Hesperus, numerous papers, scientific, literary, and poetical. In 1829, as member of the Pittsburg Philosophical Society, he gave a course of lectures on the Natural Sciences before that Society. In 1830–31, he lectured on Chemistry in the Western University of Pennsylvania. In 1832, he came to Lexington, Kentucky, somewhat reluctantly, at the urgent insistence of Reverend Benjamin O. Peers, to be associated with him in the proprietorship of his "Eclectic Institute," at that place, and to deliver a course of lectures in the Institute.[64] While thus engaged, Professor Peter was induced by Doctor Yandell, Professor of Chemistry, to accept the duties of adjunct to the chair of Chemistry, a position made vacant by the death of Professor H. H. Eaton, August 16, 1832.On March 16, 1833, he was unanimously elected to the chair of Chemistry in Morrison College, Transylvania University, being installed on the occasion of the dedication of that college, November 4, 1833, when the oath of office was administered to Mr. Peers as Proctor of Morrison College and President pro tem. of the University. Professor Peter then studied medicine in Transylvania, receiving his diploma March 18, 1834. He was present during the terrible epidemic of cholera in Lexington in 1833, and with Doctor Yandell attended the first case—that of a Mr. Henry. Though a successful practitioner, Doctor Peter, like Doctor Short, had a distaste for the life of a physician, and soon retired to more congenial scientific labors. On October 6, 1835, he married Frances Paca, eldest daughter of Major William S. Dallam. In 1838,[65] he was elected to the chair of Chemistry and Pharmacy in Transylvania Medical Department, and, until the close of the school in 1857, was honorably connected with it. From 1847 to the end, in 1857, he was chosen Dean of the Faculty, being Librarian as well. In 1839, with Doctor James M. Bush, Doctor Peter spent most of the summer in London and Paris purchasing books, apparatus, and other means of instruction for the Medical Department.[66] After hearing numerous lectures by famous doctors, and after visiting the model hospitals, etc., of the day, he writes to his wife (Paris, June 27, 1839): "We can have as great men [in Lexington] as either of those cities [London and Paris], and neither of them contains a man as eminent in surgery as Doctor Dudley"; and from London, August 11, 1839: "We have bought a great many fine books and a great deal of excellent apparatus and anatomical and other models. Transylvania will shine. No other institution in our part of the world will be able to compare with her in the means of instruction. In fact, I have seen none in Europe that is more completely prepared to teach modern medicine."[67] Daguerre, in 1839, had just published the process of his wonderful art, and it constituted perhaps the greatest novelty in Paris at the time of the sojourn there of Doctor Bush and Doctor Peter; so along with the apparatus for Transylvania was brought to Lexington a daguerreotype outfit which surely must have been the first ever seen in that city, if not the first ever used in the West. This primitive camera and its accompaniments, which Doctor Peter showed to his classes many years after, can still be found, it is supposed, among the old Transylvania possessions preserved at the Kentucky University. On his return from Europe Doctor Peter engaged in much valuable chemical research for the benefit of medical science, notably his examinations of calculi, published in 1846.[68] He also, in 1846, experimented with the then newly discovered explosive, gun-cotton, and with pyroxyline made from paper and other materials. His chemical research and teachings all were now and invariably along practical lines. Leaving theory to others, his own endeavors were in anticipation of useful results in practice. Quick to adopt new views when properly sustained by facts, he was highly appreciative of improved methods, a trait strikingly displayed when, in his old age, the most radical changes revolutionized the methods of chemical work. Laying aside the long-familiar doctrines, practiced since his far-distant youth, he took up the new with an ease—even alacrity—hardly excelled by contemporary chemists of a younger generation. In his early days he experimented much with electricity—then little understood. He gave much attention to geology, mineralogy, zoology, and botany. Associated with Doctor Charles W. Short and Professor Henry A. Griswold, he made important botanical explorations.[69] His fine herbarium, including specimens exchanged for with leading European botanists, he gave in after years to the Kentucky State Agricultural and Mechanical College. Doctor Lewis Rogers, in his address as President to the Kentucky State Medical Society, 1878, says: "In the interesting departments of Botany and Chemistry, Doctor Charles Wilkins Short and Doctor Peter are known throughout the scientific world. As teachers, the modest, almost shrinking manner, the seemingly acerb dignity, and Addisonian style of the one and the lucid expositions and brilliant illustrations of the other, must be remembered by all who ever listened to them." In 1850–53, Doctor Peter filled with distinction the chair of Chemistry in the newly founded Kentucky School of Medicine at Louisville, since so successful. On October 19, 1853, at the third meeting of the Kentucky Medical Society at Lexington, he proposed to memorialize the legislature in regard to the establishment of a Geological Survey of Kentucky. Accordingly, he prepared such a memorial (in connection with his "Report on the Relation of Forms of Disease to the Geological Formation of a Region"), accompanied by a geological map, colored by himself.[70] In consequence of this memorial, which was unanimously sanctioned by the several agricultural societies of the State, the first Geological Survey of Kentucky—which was also the first large State enterprise of the kind undertaken in the West—was begun in 1854, under the able and experienced direction of Doctor David Dale Owen. While chemist to this survey, Doctor Peter demonstrated what previously he had sturdily maintained and ably argued—that by soil analysis could be determined the elements necessary to increase and preserve the fertility of soils.[71] He was probably the first in America to apply quantitative and qualitative analysis in this manner—certainly the first to apply it to any great extent. He proved by numerous analyses that chemical analysis as practiced by him was capable of showing the deterioration of soils by long cultivation. He did this by comparing the composition of the virgin soil with that of soil taken from a near-by old field.[72] The amount of chemical work accomplished by Doctor Peter in the Kentucky Survey seems wellnigh impossible when it is considered that at the same time he lectured daily six times a week in two colleges—never omitting to prepare experiments in illustration of his subject. Some Eastern chemists were actually disposed to dispute the facts. One of these asserted that "no chemist could make more than one soil analysis in less than a month." Doctor Owen says in this regard: "Without a knowledge of the peculiar circumstances under which the work was performed, the amount of Doctor Peter's chemical labor during the last six years, as chemical assistant to the Survey of Kentucky, might appear incredible, for he has, in fact, performed a greater number of reliable, detailed, practically useful analyses of soils than any living chemist"[73]—which comes with authority, for Doctor Owen, a man not given to exaggeration, was in position to view the whole field, and as Director fully and faithfully informed himself as to what was going on all over the world in matters relating to his department. Doctor Owen said no chemists in this country had thought proper to turn their special attention to soil analysis, but that Doctor Peter, with the help of only one assistant to do the more mechanical part of the work, had in six years of the survey made one thousand, one hundred and twenty-six quantitative analyses, three hundred and seventy-five of which were of soils in which, on an average, twelve different substances were determined. In addition to this and the preparation of his own chemical report, Doctor Peter personally supervised the publication of the four royal 8vo volumes of this Survey, reading and correcting all proof and adding an obituary biographical sketch of his friend Doctor Owen, whose death, November 13, 1860, had terminated the survey. Before arrangements could be made to continue this important public work the Civil War intervened, putting a stop to all such beneficent pursuits. Doctor Peter unhesitatingly and warmly upheld his adopted country against secession. Unable to take the field with his friend, Ethelbert Dudley, he promptly fell into the ranks of Dudley's Home Guards, shoulder to shoulder with Benjamin Gratz, Madison C. Johnson, David A. Sayre, and other such fellow-citizens.[74] He was appointed Acting Assistant Surgeon in charge of Military Hospitals at Lexington, Kentucky, being most of the time senior surgeon in charge, quickly bringing his hospitals to a high state of order and efficiency. It was this gift of reducing to system, combined with untiring energy and diligence, which in his long life tended to make all his work both rapid and successful. Thus he carried on simultaneously numbers of analyses with immense saving of time, while other chemists went through each operation separately—making his results almost beyond belief. When, after the war, the survey was resumed under Professor N. S. Shaler, Doctor Peter prepared three chemical reports of his analytical work, 1873–78. A total of four hundred and seventy-seven pages, containing eight hundred and seventy-one analyses. In the survey continued under the late John R. Procter, he prepared six reports, five of which were published, covering five hundred and eighty-eight pages, describing nine hundred and seventy-seven analyses—a total of one thousand, eight hundred and forty-eight published analyses. The sixth report—the ninth of the new survey—made to Procter, was not published for the lack of funds, and the manuscript seems to have been lost. The analyses, of which there are about four hundred, will be published, however, by the present able director of the newly resumed Geological Survey, Professor C. J. Norwood, in as nearly the original form as can be restored from the records. Thus, with the one assistant, Doctor Peter made for the new survey about two thousand, two hundred and fifty analyses. Besides which, during his active life in Lexington, he had at all times considerable practice as consulting and analytical chemist, making for individuals many analyses not included in the above. As a toxicologist he had a high reputation, and his expert testimony usually carried the day in cases wherein he was called. At the time of the First Kentucky Survey, under Doctor Owen, Doctor Peter had also contributed to the second report of a Geological Reconnoissance of the Southern and Middle Counties of Arkansas, made during the years 1859 and 1860, an octavo volume of four hundred and thirty-three pages, in which he gives the history of two hundred and seventy-one chemical analyses made by himself of soils, subsoils, under-clays, nitre-earths, etc., of Arkansas, with remarks in one hundred and twenty-five pages of report. At the same time he made chemical analyses of thirty-three soils, subsoils, etc., of the State of Indiana for the survey of that State begun by Doctor D. D. Owen and continued, on Doctor Owen's death, by his brother, Colonel Richard Owen. It will be seen by reference to the Kentucky Geological Reports that Doctor Peter was the first, or among the first, to point out the fact that the lower Silurian limestones always contain a notable quantity of phosphates, and that this circumstance in part accounts for the richness of our bluegrass soils[75]—facts which he brought to the attention of the agricultural public as early as April, 1849, in the Albany Cultivator, of New York. He was apparently the first to show that some of the upper layers of the Trenton limestone are remarkably rich in phosphates, as shown by his analyses published in the reports cited. In 1865, when in accordance with Honorable John B. Bowman's lofty educational plans Kentucky University was removed to Lexington, was united with Transylvania, and included the State Agricultural and Mechanical College, Doctor Peter occupied the chair of Chemistry and Experimental Philosophy in the new University, lecturing daily in two colleges, having declined the Presidency of the Agricultural and Mechanical College, which was offered him by Regent Bowman. At this period he devoted his every energy of mind and body to assist in the upbuilding of what he fondly hoped would be the great educational institution of the West and South; for the training especially of Kentucky's youth of every rank and creed, and for the benefit of all men of all nations who sought knowledge.[76] He accepted and accomplished, it was said at the time, the work of three average men. On the separation of the State College from the Kentucky University, after a bitter sectarian controversy in which he manfully defended the Transylvania trusts—little understood by some of the controversialists—he remained with the State College at the head of the Chemical Department.[77]In 1887, Doctor Peter was made Emeritus Professor of Chemistry in the State College. It would be of interest to give a detailed account of Doctor Peter's writings, but this must of necessity be reserved for a more extended biography. He was an easy, practical, and prolific writer on a large range of subjects. Deeply interested in agriculture and horticulture, he prepared many able treatises for journals of these branches. He experimented for himself in the culture of fruits and flowers—notably in grape-culture and wine-making. In 1867–68, he assisted in editing the Farmer's Home Journal, a weekly published at Lexington, Kentucky, and until its discontinuance—well in the seventies—he contributed many articles. He was sole editor of the tenth volume of the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, and in the preceding and following volumes published a number of contributions on medical and scientific themes. He took an active part with his pen in the controversy which arose on the attempted removal to Louisville of the Transylvania Medical School by some of the Transylvania professors and the establishment at Louisville of the "Medical Institute" as a rival school.[78] Like Doctor B. W. Dudley, Doctor Peter, under a misapprehension of the facts, was at first inclined to sanction the removal of the medical school to Louisville, for he says in a "Narrative" of the controversy published in the Lexington Intelligencer, July 7, 1837: "I was in favor of the removal of the Transylvania Medical School when I believed it was to be done with the consent of its legal guardians, and with the certainty of very liberal endowments, which would increase its means of instruction; but when the bubble burst—when it was found that the name of Transylvania, the oath of office—principle, in fact, were all to be sacrificed to the splendid scheme—I drew back." And from listening to Doctor Caldwell's flattering offers of emoluments in Louisville—even to the promise that Doctor Peter should have the superintendence of the erection of the chemical laboratory—he joined Dudley in maintaining the Transylvania School at Lexington, vigorously defending Dudley, and himself also, against the attacks of the Caldwell faction. In the midst of the general hostility, Doctor Peter became antagonistic to his former friend, Doctor Yandell—indeed, bitter was the strife on all hands. But in after years, when the better part of half a century had rolled between, Doctor Peter, on the friendly advance of Doctor Yandell, forgot the vindictive feeling of the past and a correspondence both pleasant and profitable sprung up between the two old men, which was maintained until the death of Doctor Yandell. Doctor Yandell confessed that in the heat of contention he had said much which afterward he fain would recall. And it is readily to be credited that others felt the same when time was given for calm and dispassionate reflection. Doctor Peter at all times wrote much on education, much on politics and the questions of the day. Beside lectures to his classes, he gave by request many public lectures on various topics. Possessing no especial gift of voice or enunciation, he was not an orator, though as a lecturer uniformly popular; never dry, though full of information; sometimes humorous, but ever dignified. He never neglected, where appropriate, to illustrate his subject with experiments, frequently new and always skillfully performed. His rapidity and sureness of manipulation were nearly that of the prestidigitator, and were the boast and admiration of his pupils. But with this complete mastery of science there was no corresponding lack of business ability. More than once he was offered civic honors—vainly, however. Once he agreed to act as City Councilman, but summarily resigned because the Council unjustly denied to respectable colored citizens the right to establish a public school for negroes in Lexington—a refusal we can not understand to-day. He was ever ready to give time, labor, and money to public education and improvement; ready instantly to take up his pen on all questions affecting the welfare of the community in which he lived, regardless of applause, yet valuing the approval of the wise and good. His modesty was inherent. He utterly abhorred ostentation. Yet no citizen was better known, or could more surely rely upon the love and respect of his fellows—respect secured by thorough truthfulness and honesty of purpose—the "courage of his convictions" which never left him. He retained his activity of mind and body, his youthful appearance, his cheerfulness of spirit, up to a very short time before his death, which took place at "Winton," eight miles from Lexington, in the eighty-ninth year of his age, April 26, 1894. He had, as he had often wished, "worn out rather than rusted out." Perhaps the words of his colleague of more than twenty years make the best summary of his life and character: "Intense devotion to physical science and work of the laboratory, purity of speech and modesty of manner, fidelity to all duties, domestic, professional, and civic, fidelity to settled convictions and principles; above all, his long and illustrious career in educating so many thousands of the young, and in setting before them a model so worthy of their imitation and remembrance; these were the traits, this was the service that crowned his busy life of nearly ninety years with honor, admiration, and renown."
Professor James Conquest Cross, M. D. Born in the vicinity of Lexington, Kentucky, was early distinguished for superior natural energy and mental ability. He was a graduate of Transylvania and most ambitious to take place as member of its Faculty. Appointed to the chair of Institutes of Medicine in 1837, having been called from the Medical College of Ohio, at Cincinnati, where he held a professorship, he occupied the position in Lexington until 1843–44, and died a few years thereafter. He was Dean of the Medical Faculty in 1838. Doctor Cross contributed several papers to the medical journals, but wrote no large work. He was distinguished for readiness and brilliancy rather than for solidity. His strong ambition and self-confidence, with his considerable abilities and extensive reading, gave promise of a most distinguished career, which unhappily a certain want of mental ballast measurably prevented.[79]
Doctor John Eberle[80] Was a native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and was a little over fifty years of age at the time of his decease. Born and educated among the Germans of Lancaster, he retained the peculiar accent and idiom of that people to the day of his death, as also their habits of industry and perseverance in favorite pursuits. At an early period of his history, Doctor Eberle was deeply involved in politics and for some time conducted a German political paper. Prior to his removal to Philadelphia, which occurred about the year 1818, he published several interesting papers in the New York Medical Repository and other journals. Shortly after his settlement in Philadelphia, he became the editor of the American Medical Recorder, known throughout the country as one of our ablest periodicals. In 1822, his work on Therapeutics and Materia Medica first appeared, after having encountered many obstacles that for a time seemed to preclude its publication. The author assured the writer of this notice that he failed in all his attempts to procure a publisher, who would give him anything for the copyright, until the person who finally became its proprietor offered two hundred and fifty dollars for the work. Being the first book of the author, he accepted the offer in the hope of being more successful in his subsequent undertakings. In 1824, on the establishment of Jefferson Medical College, Doctor Eberle constituted one of its Faculty, and continued in the school until his removal to Cincinnati in 1831. While in Jefferson he taught the Theory and Practice, Materia Medica, and Obstetrics at different periods, and was also engaged as editor of the American Medical Review, a journal devoted especially to the interests of that school. While in the Jefferson Faculty he published the first edition of his work on Practice, which, it is well known, has passed through several editions, and unlike its predecessor yielded a handsome compensation to its author. In 1831, Doctor Eberle was invited (in connection with Doctors Thomas D. Mitchell and George McClellan) by Doctor Drake, to unite in the formation of a new medical school at Cincinnati. In the winter of 1831–32, the deceased gave his first course of lectures in the West as Professor of Materia Medica and Medical Botany in the Medical College of Ohio, in which school he remained until the fall of 1837, when he became connected with the Medical Department of Transylvania. While in Cincinnati, he prepared his work on the Diseases of Children, for which the publishers gave him a fair compensation, and it is understood that he was engaged a year ago in getting ready for the press A System of Midwifery. That he was importuned by his publishers in Ohio to prepare such a work is known to the writer of this notice. In addition to the publications of Doctor Eberle above named, there were others of less magnitude. Among these we name a small work of a botanical character, for young students; and it may be noticed here that botany was a favorite study with the deceased. Doctor Eberle was not fond of the practice of his profession, or he might have become rich in its pursuit. He was devoted especially to books, and as a journalist he has not perhaps been equaled in the United States of America. In his deportment he was plain, unassuming, unostentatious; and his whole aspect was indicative of one who had long been a companion of the midnight lamp. Few there are in our profession whose labors have given them such extensive celebrity as fell to the lot of Professor Eberle. His Practice of Physic is in almost every medical library in the West, and has been noticed with high commendation by foreign journalists. His death has left a chasm in the profession, and especially in the school of the West, that is greatly lamented.
Doctor Eberle died at Lexington, Kentucky, February 2, 1838, while filling the chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine.
Professor Thomas Duche Mitchell, M. D., Was appointed from the Medical College of Ohio to the chair of Chemistry and Pharmacy in the Medical Department of Transylvania in 1837. He was transferred to that of Materia Medica and Medical Botany in the following year, Doctor Peter having been called to the chair of Chemistry, etc. In consequence of the death of Professor John Eberle early in the session of 1837–38, Doctor Mitchell was required to fill both this and his own chair during the session, an arduous duty which he performed faithfully and to the satisfaction of all parties.[81]With equal ability and success he performed a similar double duty to the full satisfaction of his classes in the winter of 1844–45, when, in consequence of the death of Professor William H. Richardson, the chair of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children became vacant. He was appointed to that chair. He was also Dean of the Faculty in the Transylvania School from 1839 to 1846. Doctor Mitchell was born in Philadelphia in 1791, in which city for three generations his ancestors resided. He died in the same city May 13, 1865, in his seventy-fourth year, having heroically performed his duties as Professor almost up to the time of his death, although he was a constant sufferer from painful neuralgic disease of the stomach, at times almost unendurable. His early education was in Quaker schools, the best in those times in that city, and in the University of Pennsylvania. After a year spent in a drug store and chemical laboratory he became office pupil of the late Doctor Parrish, and, after attendance on three full courses of medical lectures in the Medical Department of the University, he graduated in medicine. His thesis "On Acidification and Combustion" was published in the Memoirs of the Columbian Medical Society. His mind and pen always in active operation, he published papers in Coxe's Medical Museum, New York Medical Repository, Duane's Portfolio, and other periodicals. Early in 1812, he was appointed Professor of Vegetable and Animal Physiology in Saint John's Lutheran College, and, in the following year, as Lazaretto Physician, which office he held for three years. In 1819, he published a duodecimo volume on Medical Chemistry. From 1822 to 1831, he was actively engaged in medical practice at Frankford, near Philadelphia. In 1826, he founded a Total Abstinence Temperance Society, to the tenets of which he rigidly adhered during the whole of his life, deprecating the use of alcohol, even in the preparation of the tinctures of the apothecary. He was also a strict Presbyterian. In 1826, the honorary degree of A. M. was conferred on him by the Trustees of Princeton College, New Jersey. In the winter of 1830–31, he was called to the chair of Chemistry in the Miami University, and in the following summer to the same chair in the Medical College of Ohio, at Cincinnati, which was soon thereafter amalgamated with the Miami School, where he remained until called to the same chair in the Medical Department of Transylvania University in 1837. He was transferred, as before mentioned, in the following year to the chair of Materia Medica, Doctor Peter having been called to that of Chemistry, etc. Here Doctor Mitchell continued until the end of the session of 1848–49. In the summer of 1847, the Philadelphia College of Medicine held its first session, and Doctor Mitchell filled in it the chair of Theory and Practice, Obstetrics, and Medical Jurisprudence. In March, 1849, resigning his chair in the Transylvania School, he joined himself with the Philadelphia College with a view to a permanent connection. Declining tempting offers from medical schools in Missouri and Tennessee, he, in 1852, resigned his chair in Philadelphia and accepted that of Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Kentucky School of Medicine at Louisville. He performed the duties of that professorship to the satisfaction of all parties until 1854, when he resigned on account of ill health and returned to his native city. Recovering, in a measure, his health, he was chosen, without any movement on his part, to fill the chair of Materia Medica and General Therapeutics in Jefferson Medical School of Philadelphia. This chair he occupied up to the year of his death. Doctor Mitchell was an able and indefatigable writer and author. Without recurring to his earlier writings, he published in 1832 an octavo volume of five hundred and fifty-three pages, On Chemical Philosophy, on the basis of The Elements of Chemistry, by Doctor Reid, of Edinburgh. In the same year he produced his Hints to Students, and acted as co-editor of the Western Medical Gazette with Professors Eberle and Staughton; contributed papers to the New York Repository, Philadelphia Museum, Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, Western Medical Recorder, Western Lancet, American Medical Recorder, American Review, North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Transylvania Medical Journal,[82] New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Esculapian Register, etc. In 1850, he published an octavo volume of seven hundred and fifty pages On Materia Medica, also an edition of Eberle on the Diseases of Children, to which he added notes and a sequel of some two hundred pages. He also wrote a volume of six hundred pages On the Fevers of the United States, which he did not publish.Doctor Mitchell was a clear and impressive lecturer, a most industrious student even in his latter days, a learned, classical, and scientific scholar and a most rigidly upright and conscientious gentleman.[83]
James Mills Bush, M. D., A native of Kentucky,[84] born in Frankfort May, 1808, graduated as A. B. in Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, and began the study of medicine and surgery in the office of the celebrated Doctor Alban Goldsmith, Louisville, Kentucky. He removed to Lexington in 1830–31, to attend the medical lectures in Transylvania University, and to become a private pupil of its renowned surgeon, Professor Benjamin W. Dudley. To Doctor Dudley he became personally attached by sentiments of affection and esteem, which were warmly returned by his eminent preceptor; so that, when young Bush received the honor of the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1833, Doctor Dudley immediately appointed him his demonstrator and prosector in Anatomy and Surgery, to which branches of medical science and art Doctor Bush was ardently devoted. This responsible office he filled with eminent ability and success until 1837, when he was officially made Adjunct Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to his distinguished colleague and friend, Doctor Dudley. He occupied this honorable position to the great satisfaction of all concerned until the year 1844, when he became the Professor of Anatomy, Doctor Dudley retaining the chair of Surgery. In the chair of Anatomy he continued until the dissolution of the Transylvania Medical School in 1857. In the meanwhile this school, in 1850, had been changed from a winter to a summer school; Doctor Bush, with some of his colleagues and some physicians of Louisville, having thought proper to establish the Kentucky School of Medicine[85] in Louisville as a winter school. In this latter college Doctor Bush remained for three sessions—giving thus two full courses of lectures per annum—when he and his Lexington colleagues, resigning from the Louisville school, returned to that of Lexington, re-establishing a winter session.[86] Doctor Bush was ever a most conscientious and ardent laborer in his profession, and, during the lifetime of his preceptor, Doctor Dudley, was his constant associate and assistant as well in the medical school as in his medical and surgical practice. On the retirement of that distinguished surgeon and professor, his mantle fell upon Doctor Bush. In the language of his friend, the late Doctor Lewis Rogers, in 1873: "When Doctor Dudley retired from teaching, Doctor Bush was appointed to the vacant chair. When Doctor Dudley retired from the field of his brilliant achievements as a surgeon Doctor Bush had the rare courage to take possession of it. No higher tribute can be paid to him than to say that he has since held possession without a successful rival." DOCTOR JAMES M. BUSH.
From a Photograph by Mullen. Most ably and successfully did he thus maintain himself as one fit to follow in the footsteps of our great surgeon. His sterling qualities as a man, his most kind and endearing manners as a physician, his great skill and experience in anatomy and surgery, which had been as well the pleasure as the devoted labor of his life; his remarkable accuracy of eye, the more acute because of congenital myopia, his delicacy of hand and unswerving nerve in the use of instruments in the most difficult operations, endeared him to his patients and won the respect and admiration of his medical brethren. Doctor Bush was a lucid and impressive teacher of his peculiar branch of medical art and science, and always attached his pupils strongly to him as an honored preceptor and friend. During his active lifetime, spent chiefly in acquiring and putting in practice the rare professional skill which distinguished him, he gave but little time to the use of his pen. Hence he left no large book as the record of his experience. His principal writings were published, in 1837, in the tenth volume of the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, and these were written for that journal on the solicitation of the present writer, who edited that volume. They consist of: 1. A short report of a case of epilepsy, produced in a negro girl by blows of the windlass of a well on the parietal bone, which was entirely and speedily cured under the preliminary treatment by Doctor Dudley of mercurial purgatives and low diet, preparatory to the use of the trephine, which, as is well known, had been used with great success by Doctor Dudley in such cases. 2. Report of a case of insidious inflammation of the pia mater, complicated with pleuritis—with the autopsy. 3. A more extended paper, entitled "Remarks on Mechanical Pressure Applied by Means of the Bandage; Illustrated by a Variety of Cases." In which the mode of application and modus operandi are most clearly given, and illustrated by many interesting cases, mostly from the surgical practice of Doctor Dudley. 4. "Dissection of an Idiot's Brain." The subject—a female twenty-five years of age—had been born idiotic, blind, deaf, and dumb; the head was very small, and the brain on dissection was found to weigh only twenty ounces, and to have large serous cavities in the coronal portions of the cerebral hemispheres. The anatomy of the eyes was perfect, but there was no nervous connection between the optic nerve and the thalami nervorum opticorum. 5. A short notice of three operations of lithotomy, performed on May 31, 1837, by Doctor Dudley, with his assistance. 6. "Interesting Autopsy." On the body of a negro man who had been the subject of sudden falling fits, and was under treatment for disease of the chest. The autopsy disclosed hypertrophy of the right side of the heart, and a most remarkable course and lengthening of the colon. 7. "Observations on the Operation of Lithotomy, Illustrated by Cases from the Practice of Professor B. W. Dudley." An extensive and lucid description of the method of operation and the remarkably successful experience of Doctor Dudley in this part of his practice, giving report of one hundred and fifty-two successful cases up to that time. In addition, the Doctor contributed an occasional bibliographical review or notice. And these seem to be the whole of his published professional writings. Doctor Bush was married, in 1835, to Miss Charlotte James, of Chillicothe. Of their three children the eldest, Benjamin Dudley, was a young man of remarkable promise as a surgeon and physician when he was cut off, an event which cast a gloom over the remaining days of the life of his father. Few young men of his age had ever attained such proficiency or developed such sterling qualities.[87] The death of Doctor Bush, which took place on February 14, 1875, was followed by general and unusual manifestations of respect and regret, not only on the part of the members of the profession, but by the people of the city at large. Few citizens were more extensively known, loved, and honored in life or followed to the grave by a greater concourse of mourning friends.
Nathan Ryno Smith, M. D., Was called from his residence in Baltimore, Maryland, to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in Transylvania in the year 1838. He resigned the chair and returned to that city in 1840, having delivered three annual courses of lectures here. He was succeeded in this chair by Doctor Elisha Bartlett. Doctor Smith was born May 21, 1797, in the town of Cornish, New Hampshire, where his father, Nathan Smith—afterward Professor of Physic and Surgery in Yale College—had been for ten years in the practice of his profession. In a brief sketch of his father, Doctor Smith unconsciously drew the outlines of his own character. "In the practice of surgery," he said, "Professor Smith displayed an original and inventive mind. His friends claim for him the establishment of scientific principles and the invention of resources in practice which will stand as lasting monuments of a mind fertile in expedients and unshackled by the dogmas of the schools." The father, at the age of twenty-four, after an early life of industry and adventure in the then new country, had been so impressed and attracted by witnessing a surgical operation that he at once devoted himself to surgery and medicine, and with such ardor and success that for forty years succeeding he was a distinguished member and teacher in his profession. The son, with much the same natural bent of mind, after receiving his early education at Dartmouth and graduating at Yale in 1817—spending a year and a half in Virginia as a classical tutor—began the study of medicine in Yale, where his father was Professor of Physic and Surgery. He there received the degree of Doctor of Medicine, in 1823. He began practice in Burlington, Vermont, in 1824. In 1825, he was appointed Professor of Surgery and Anatomy in the University of Vermont, the Medical Department of which was organized principally by his exertions, aided by his father. In the winter of 1825–26, he attended the medical lectures in the University of Pennsylvania, with a view to improvement in his profession and in the art of teaching in it. While there he was invited by the late celebrated surgeon, George McClellan—to whom he had become favorably known—to take the chair of Anatomy in the new Jefferson Medical College, which McClellan and other members of the profession were engaged in organizing. This situation he occupied with success for two years, leaving it then to accept the chair of Anatomy in the School of Medicine of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, which had been vacated by Professor Granville Sharpe Pattison, in 1827. In Baltimore he soon acquired an extensive medical and surgical practice. On the death of Professor John B. Davidge he was transferred to the chair of Surgery. In the language of his biographer and colleague, Samuel C. Chew, M. D.: "In Baltimore he found a congenial home and when, at the age of fourscore, he was laid to rest among us, his name had been for a whole lifetime a household word throughout our State." When, in 1838, he accepted the inducement offered him by the Medical Faculty of Transylvania University to occupy the chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in their college at Lexington, Kentucky,[88] during the four months of the winter course of lectures, he did not abandon his residence in Baltimore, but at the close of each session returned to his professional work in that city. It was there especially, as a professor and practitioner of surgery, that his life-work was done. Doctor Smith was a man of remarkable mental activity, "acuteness of perception and extraordinary power of adaptation to circumstances as they might arise, promptness of action and untiring industry.... And yet with his great gifts there was about him a remarkable simplicity of character and a transparent ingenuousness which was as incapable of affectation as of falsehood."His forte was Surgery, yet his lectures here on the Theory and Practice of Medicine were exceedingly clear and instructive. One little peculiarity of his may be noticed. He never lectured without a small whalebone rod or pointer. Without this in his hand he seemed to fear the loss of continuity of his ideas. As remarked by his biographer, "his wand must always be at hand, for, like the magician's divining-rod, it seemed to have some mystic connection with the exercise of his powers." Early in his professional life he published his work on the Anatomy of the Arteries, and, in his later days, his work on Fractures of the Lower Extremities. He was engaged in the preparation of a work on surgery at the time of his death. His inventive genius, which was remarkable, was exhibited in several improvements of the instruments and apparatus of surgery, especially in his lithotome. In the practice of his son—Professor Alan P. Smith—in a series of fifty-two consecutive cases, without a single death, he used his father's lithotome in all but six cases. This great success he attributed mainly to the instrument. Another valuable improvement was his "anterior splint." Doctor Smith died on the third of July, 1877, a few weeks after the completion of his eightieth year, full of honors. "He has left behind him a record of a great surgeon, a brave and true citizen and magnanimous gentleman."
Elisha Bartlett, M. D., Etc. Born in Smithfield, Rhode Island, October 6, 1804. His parents, Otis and Waite Bartlett, were highly respectable members of the "Society of Friends." Their son, whose early education was under the auspices of this Society, possessed all the unostentatious virtues which characterized that sect. At the "Friends' Institution" in New York, under the celebrated teacher, Jacob Willett, he obtained a highly finished classical education. He subsequently attended medical lectures in Boston and Providence and graduated as M. D. at Brown University, Providence, in 1826. Soon after graduation he spent a year pursuing medical studies under distinguished professors in Paris, France, and in classical Italy. In 1836, he was elected as the first mayor of the town of Lowell; was re-elected at the end of his first term, and afterward, in 1840, was honored by election to the Legislature of Massachusetts. A statesman and not a politician, he soon abandoned political life for the more congenial one of a medical teacher. [89]"In 1828, he was offered the chair of Anatomy in the Medical School at Woodstock, Vermont, which honor he declined. "In 1832, he was appointed to a Professorship in the Medical School at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which he held for several years. He also held a chair one year in the Medical Department of Dartmouth College, and for one year in Baltimore. "In 1841, he was called to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Medical Department of Transylvania University, which he occupied for three years with ability and success."[90] After a visit to Europe he again returned, in 1846,[91] to the Transylvania Medical College, teaching in the same chair for another three years. "He subsequently delivered a course of medical lectures in the Medical School at Louisville, giving also summer lectures at Woodstock, Vermont, and other places—his instruction being highly appreciated by his colleagues and most acceptable to his students. "At length he was called to an important professorship in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. Here he continued for three years, when, compelled by failing health, he abandoned the position to retire to his paternal acres in Smithfield—to die, after a long and lingering illness, on July 19, 1855." His disease—partial paralysis of the lower extremities, with torturing neuralgia and finally softening of the brain, the result of lead poisoning, caused—as he believed, and as he informed the writer—by the use of water which had passed for a considerable distance through leaden pipes. The beautiful and sterling traits of the character of Doctor Bartlett are most happily portrayed by the distinguished medical professor and poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, August 16, 1855, from which we make a few extracts, viz: "Hardly any American physician was more widely known to his countrymen, or more favorably considered abroad, where his writings had carried his name. His personal graces were known to a less extensive circle of admiring friends.... To them it is easy to recall his ever-welcome and gracious presence. On his expanded forehead no one could fail to trace the impress of a large and calm intelligence.... A man so full of life will rarely be found so gentle and quiet in all his ways.... The same qualities which fitted him for a public speaker naturally gave him signal success as a teacher. Had he possessed nothing but his clearness and eloquence of language and elocution, he could hardly have failed to find a popular welcome.... He had a manner at once impressive and pleasing, a lucid order which kept the attention and intelligence of the slowest hearer, and attractions of a personal character always esteemed and beloved by students.... Yet few suspected him of giving utterance in rhythmical shape to his thoughts or feelings. It was only when his failing limbs could bear him no longer, as conscious existence slowly retreated from the palsied nerves, that he revealed himself freely in truest and tenderest form of expression. We knew he was dying by slow degrees, and we heard from him from time to time, or saw him always serene and always hopeful while hope could have a place in his earthly future ... when to the friends he loved there came, as a farewell gift, ... a little book with a few songs in it—songs with his whole warm heart in them—they knew that his hour was come, and their tears fell fast as they read the loving thoughts that he had clothed in words of beauty and melody. "Among the memorials of departed friendships we treasure the little book of 'songs,' entitled Simple Settings in Verse for Six Portraits from Mr. Dickens' Gallery, Boston, 1855—his last present, as it was his last production."
Doctor Lotan G. Watson, Of North Carolina, filled the chair of Theory and Practice in Transylvania in the sessions of 1844 and 1845 only. He came highly recommended as a physician of extensive practice of not less than twenty years. "A gentleman of undoubted talents. He has the reputation of bringing to his cases a great affluence of resource and fertility of expedient, regulated by a judgment discriminative and safe. He writes with facility and elegance, and converses with fluency, animation, and impressiveness. He thinks clearly and communicates his ideas with facility and a corresponding clearness." Extract from letter of Senator W. P. Mangum, of North Carolina.
Leonidas M. Lawson, M. D., Who filled the chair of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical Department of Transylvania University from 1843 to 1846, inclusive, was born in Nicholas County, Kentucky, September 10, 1812. He had received his medical degree from this same department of Transylvania in 1837. He was engaged in Cincinnati in private practice, giving clinical instruction in the hospital and editing his recently established medical periodical, The Western Lancet—of which he was sole originator and proprietor—when he was called to the newly established chair of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology in the Transylvania Medical Department, in which he had graduated. Here he taught with great success until called to the chair of Materia Medica and General Pathology in the Ohio Medical College at Cincinnati in 1847. During the vacation months of 1845, he spent seven months in a visit to Europe, and especially in clinical studies in Guy's Hospital, London, with great advantage to himself. Doctor Lawson continued to teach from this chair until the death of Professor J. P. Harrison, whom he succeeded in that of the Principles and Practice of Medicine and Clinical Medicine, in the same college in 1852. He was appointed Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Kentucky School of Medicine in Louisville in 1854, but accepted a call to the same chair in the Medical College of Ohio, Cincinnati, in 1857. He filled the chair of Clinical Medicine in the University of Louisiana, New Orleans, in 1860, but returned in consequence of the Civil War to the Medical College of Ohio the following year, in which college he remained until his death, January 21, 1864. He founded the Western Lancet, and was its sole editor and proprietor from 1842 up to the time of his decease. He also edited Hope's Morbid Anatomy, 1844, and published a treatise on the Practical Treatment of Phthisis Pulmonalis in 1861. Doctor Lawson was a lover of his profession and a most indefatigable worker and student. Remarkably lucid and impressive in his oral teachings, and methodical in his laborious professional and editorial occupations, he was a modest but self-possessed, undemonstrative gentleman of high probity and personal merit. The world at large did not fully appreciate his value, or that of his labors. His daughter, Miss Louisa Lawson, studied sculpture as a profession, and as an artist is well known.
Ethelbert Ludlow Dudley, M. D., Nephew of the late distinguished surgeon, Benjamin W. Dudley, was his private pupil for many years. He graduated in the Medical Department of Transylvania University with distinguished honor in 1842, after having attended three full courses of instruction in that department. His first course of medical lectures was in the winter of 1838–39. It was the first session in which the present writer occupied the chair of Chemistry and Pharmacy, and well he remembers the assiduous attention of his pupil; his avidity in the acquisition of knowledge and his unusual ability to retain it. Distrusting yet his own attainments and desirous of more thorough training before taking upon himself the responsible and arduous offices of a practitioner, he, under the immediate charge of his uncle, then in active practice, attended two other full courses of medical lectures (sessions 1842–43 and 1843–44) as resident graduate. During this period he sometimes officiated as prosector to his distinguished kinsman.[92] Photograph of Doctor Dudley DOCTOR ETHELBERT L. DUDLEY.
From a Photograph. Before the next following session, Doctor Ethelbert L. Dudley was appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy in the place of Doctor James M. Bush, who had been promoted to the chair of Anatomy. This responsible office he filled until called to the chair of General and Pathological Anatomy in 1847–48. From the origin of this medical school Professor Benjamin W. Dudley had taught in the combined chair of Anatomy and Surgery, blending the two in a manner most instructive and practical.[93] In 1837, he accepted Doctor James M. Bush as adjunct to the combined professorship, and in 1844, Doctor Bush having been appointed Professor of Anatomy, the elder Dudley restricted himself to the chair of the Principles of Surgery. In the summer of 1846, Doctor Ethelbert L. Dudley was appointed to deliver a course of lectures on Comparative Anatomy. This duty he performed to the highest satisfaction of all concerned; and when, almost at the beginning of the next regular session (1847–48), he was called to the chair of Anatomy and Physiology, he successfully encountered the great labor of preparing and delivering a new course of lectures on these subjects. At the same time he also discharged the arduous duties of Demonstrator of Anatomy—duties more onerous in this school, in our small inland city, than in most other medical colleges. No one in the whole school accomplished half the work which he mastered. No task seemed too great for his young and ardent energies. In 1849, he originated and took upon himself the sole charge as editor of the Transylvania Medical Journal, a new series of the old Transylvania Journal of Medicine. He published three volumes in three successive years, aided only occasionally by some of his colleagues. In the spring of 1850, he visited Europe for professional improvement, making many friends; amongst the distinguished medical men of England particularly. Immediately on his return from Europe, in the autumn of that year, the present writer announced to him, in the city of New York, his appointment to the chair of Descriptive Anatomy and Histology in the Kentucky School of Medicine. This was a new school which some of the physicians of Louisville and professors of the Lexington school were about to establish in the former city, to which place students of medicine from the South and West were beginning to flock, to the neglect somewhat of the time-honored Transylvania school, in which it was proposed to continue medical instruction in summer sessions. This appointment he accepted, joining in the preliminary October course of lectures and aiding greatly by his talents and energy in building up that institution. Transferred in the following year to the chair of Surgery in the Transylvania summer school, on the retirement of his uncle from active professional life, he continued to teach with distinguished ability in the position made illustrious by his predecessor, until the close of the school shortly before the outbreak of our Civil War. In the second year of the Kentucky School of Medicine, he was transferred to the chair of Surgical Anatomy and Operative Surgery, and accordingly gave the surgical-clinical instruction in the Marine Hospital of Louisville to the combined classes of the two medical schools of that city during the session of 1851–52. A course which was a decided success for the young professor and surgeon, and which helped to place him at once on the elevated position as a professional man and a gentleman which he maintained to the day of his death and to which few men, of his age especially, ever are fortunate enough to attain.[94] After another successful session in this school he, with the other Transylvania professors, resigned and returned permanently to Lexington, resuming his practice there and his duties in the renewed winter sessions of the Transylvania Medical Department. As a practitioner, especially of surgery, Doctor E. L. Dudley always commanded the highest respect and admiration of his colleagues as well as the confidence and affections of his patients. Singularly unselfish and always willing to devote himself fully to his profession, his patients and his friends, few men had the power so quickly and so firmly to bind others to him with the ties of affection. With nerves as of steel, clear eye, quick judgment and answering hand, combined with the kind feelings of a woman and a fullness of professional knowledge rarely surpassed, his short career as a surgeon—all too brief!—was yet a brilliant one. Had his life been spared to him the name of Dudley had achieved a yet higher distinction in the annals of surgery.At the outbreak of our Civil War, Doctor Dudley's loyal attachment to the nation and his love of country caused him to take an active part against the rebellion. While the fate of Kentucky hung yet in the balance of a professed neutrality, he was actively instrumental in organizing a battalion of "Home Guards," of which he was at once appointed Commandant—an organization which greatly helped to prevent the precipitation of our State into the war for secession.[95] Obtaining authority to organize a regiment of volunteers for active service, of which he was Colonel, preferring this active position to the less belligerent one of Medical Director which was proffered him, he left Lexington with his command for the southern part of the State. There, exhausted by the continued labors and exposures of his combined offices of colonel, surgeon and physician to his men (which he would not commit to another), he fell a victim to typhoid fever on February 20, 1862, at the age of forty-four. His remains, brought to Lexington, were received with public honors and were followed to the cemetery by a long procession of sorrowing friends.
Samuel Annan, M. D., Was born at Philadelphia, Pa., in the year 1800—a descendant of Scotch ancestors. He graduated as M. D. at the Edinburgh University in 1820. His thesis, entitled De Appoplexia Sanguinia, is in the library of the Medical and Surgical Faculty of Maryland. He was licentiate of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1822, being then ex-President of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh. From 1827 to 1834, he ably occupied the chair of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical Department of Washington University at Baltimore, Maryland. From 1838 to 1845, he was physician to the Baltimore Alms-house. In 1846, he was called to the chair of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children in the Medical Department of Transylvania University, a position which he occupied with great ability until, in 1849, he was transferred to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in the same institution, in which he gave general satisfaction until 1854, when he resigned that position. During the years 1853–57, he was Superintendent to the Insane Asylum at Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He became surgeon to the Confederate States Army at the outbreak of our Civil War in 1861, maintaining that position until 1864. In 1866, he was surgeon to the steamship "Carroll" of the Liverpool line, from April to November. He died at Baltimore, January 19, 1868. Doctor Annan was a person of great activity of mind and body, of high intelligence and probity of character. In the course of his active life and practice in his profession he found time to contribute many valuable articles to the medical journals, of which we quote the following, viz: "Cases of Bronchotomy." Maryland Medical Recorder, Vol. VII, p. 42. 1823. "On the Surgical Anatomy of Hernia." Ibid., Vol. III, p. 529. 1829. "On Polypus Nasi." Ibid., No. 3, p. 655. 1830. "On the Use of Wine in Fevers." Ibid., p. 279. 1831. "Address to the Graduates of Washington University." 1834."New Views of Certain Dislocations." American Journal of Medical Science, Vol. XVIII, p. 376. 1836. "On the Treatment of Prolapsus Ani." Ibid., p. 334. 1836. "On Spinal Irritation and Inflammation." Ibid., Vol. XX, p. 85. 1837. "On Cases in the Baltimore Alms-house." Ibid., Vol. XXII, p. 378. 1838. "On Wind Contusions." American Medical Journal, Vol. II, pp. 3, 133, and 213. 1838. "On Cases in the Baltimore Alms-house." Journal of Medical Science, Vol. XXIV, p. 316; and Journal of Medical Science, Vol. XXV, p. 32. 1839. "On Cases in the Baltimore Alms-house." Medical and Surgical Journal, pp. 322 and 338. 1840. "Lecture at Opening of Kentucky School of Medicine." 1850. "On Fracture of the Skull." American Medical Record, No. 3, Vol. II, p. 449. "Case of Laceration of the Ileum from External Injury." American Journal of Medical Science, p. 287. 1838. For most of the facts contained in this brief sketch of the active life of Doctor Annan we are indebted to the kindness of Doctor Oscar J. Coskery, of Baltimore.Note.—In 1850, Doctor Annan accepted the chair of Pathology and Practice of Medicine in the new Kentucky School of Medicine in Louisville, which position he occupied for two years with great ability, when he resigned to return to his native city. In 1849, when Doctor Annan was transferred to the chair of Theory and Practice, the chair of Obstetrics was filled by Doctor William M. Boling, of Montgomery, Alabama, for one session. Doctor Boling had taught in the Memphis Medical School of Tennessee, and was "favorably known in the South as a good practitioner, an able medical writer, and an excellent teacher."
Professor Henry M. Bullitt Occupied the chair of Materia Medica and Medical Botany with ability during the session of 1849–50, after which, with the aid of some of his Transylvania associates, he established the "Kentucky School of Medicine," which still maintains a prosperous condition. "Doctor Bullitt commenced the study of medicine at seventeen years of age, in the office of Doctor Coleman Rogers, senior, of Louisville, entering the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania as a pupil, and graduating with high honor in 1838. Returning to Louisville, he began the practice of medicine in partnership with Doctor Joshua B. Flint, thus continuing for many years, their office being the headquarters of the prominent physicians of this city. "Doctor Bullitt passed the year 1845 in Europe, where he took advantage of every opportunity of advancing in medical knowledge. He returned liberally equipped with the good fruits of his sojourn abroad. In 1846, he was elected a professor in the St. Louis Medical College and lectured there in 1846–47 and 1847–48. In 1849, he was elected to the chair of Materia Medica, etc., in Transylvania University.... In 1850, he was mainly instrumental in the establishment of the Kentucky School of Medicine in Louisville, aided by 'prominent members of the Faculty of Transylvania.' "In 1866, he was elected to the chair of Theory and Practice in the University of Louisville, and, in 1867, was transferred to that of Physiology. In 1868, he established the Louisville Medical College, with which he remained during the several years of his professional life, his increasing deafness greatly marring his social and professional enjoyments. "Doctor Bullitt was an able writer on professional subjects.... He held, successively, chairs in five medical schools," in all with great ability."In 1866, he was elected Health Officer of the city of Louisville," which office he most ably filled.... "Doctor Bullitt was one of the ablest Health Officers the city ever possessed," and was author of many papers of "great merit in numerous medical journals. His great affliction, deafness, was all that prevented him from taking the foremost position among medical practitioners, teachers, and writers. But he bore the misfortune with singular equanimity and fortitude." Doctor Bullitt died on the seventh of January, 1880, after a number of weeks' confinement to his bed with Bright's disease.
The greater part of this brief sketch of the life of Doctor Bullitt is copied from an able obituary notice published in the Louisville Journal at the time of his death.
Henry Martyn Skillman, M. D., Youngest child of Thomas T. and Elizabeth Farrar Skillman, born September 4, 1824, at Lexington, Kentucky, was educated in Transylvania University. He spent two or three years in the drug and apothecary business in Lexington, and commenced the study of medicine and surgery in 1844, graduating as Doctor of Medicine, etc., in 1847. He was appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy in the Medical Department of Transylvania University in 1848. In 1851, he was appointed Professor of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology, which position he occupied with skill and success until the close of the Medical College in 1857. Since that time he has devoted himself to the duties of his profession in medicine and surgery, being "one of the most skillful, successful, and accomplished physicians in Kentucky," and "having inherited the admirable qualities of his parents, is one of the most honorable and useful citizens of Lexington."[96] Since the above was written, the gentle and busy life of this last surviving member of the Transylvania Medical Faculty came suddenly to a close at his home in Lexington, March 21, 1902, at a quarter past four o'clock in the afternoon, apparently without warning. Only two hours previously, handsome and smiling and dignified as usual, he had visited a patient, and he expected in a few hours to resume his professional rounds when the last summons came. Photograph of Doctor Skillman DOCTOR HENRY MARTYN SKILLMAN.
From a Photograph by Mullen. It is hardly possible for a man to depart this life without leaving an enemy, but if Doctor Skillman, in his fifty-four years of active professional life, had made even a few enemies they hesitated to declare themselves. His own nature was to see good in others; their defects were not made prominent by him. As he spoke no evil, so nothing but good was said of him. But with his amiable, benevolent, compromising disposition there was no trace of weakness. Strict in professional etiquette, immovable in principle, he repelled with gentle but irresistible firmness every effort to shake his integrity. The loveliness of his character and personality is best portrayed in "Luke, the Beloved Physician," a tribute paid, on his death, editorially in the Lexington Herald by Kentucky's favorite orator and statesman, every word of which is as true as it is well-chosen and beautiful. Doctor Skillman held numerous offices of trust; was elected, in 1869, President of Kentucky State Medical Society and, in 1889, the first President of Lexington and Fayette County Medical Society, and was at the time of his death the oldest practicing physician in Lexington, having seen that city grow from eight thousand to thirty thousand inhabitants. It is claimed that he was the first physician to administer chloroform there. For two years during the Civil War he was contract surgeon for the Government. Doctor Skillman's father, Thomas T. Skillman, a native of New Jersey, came to Lexington in 1809, and soon founded there the largest publishing house in the Mississippi Valley, the name of T. T. Skillman on the title page of a work being a guarantee of its excellence and fitness for the family circle. In 1823, an edition of several thousand copies of the entire Bible was published by Mr. Skillman from stereotype plates sent from New York by the American Bible Society. He founded the Evangelical Recorder and Western Review, afterward edited by Reverend John Breckinridge, the young and talented pastor of "the McChord Church"; also the Western Luminary, in 1824, the first religious paper issued in the West. Doctor Skillman married, October 30, 1851, Margaret, daughter of Matthew T. Scott, President of the Northern Bank of Kentucky. Of their children only one is living, Henry Martyn Skillman, of the Lexington Security Trust and Safety Vault Company.
Samuel M. Letcher, M. D., Of a prominent Kentucky family, also a graduate of the Medical Department of Transylvania University who had won distinction in his profession in Lexington, was called to the chair of Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children in that school in 1851, and performed the duties of that chair with ability and success until the close of the Medical College in Lexington in 1857. During the Civil War he was placed in charge of a United States General Hospital in Lexington, a position which he held for some time, giving great satisfaction. He died February 1, 1863, in Lexington, Kentucky.
John Rowan Allen, M. D., Who was Superintendent of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum at Lexington,[97] Kentucky, and who first introduced there the moral treatment of the insane instead of forcible means, was appointed Professor of Materia Medica and Botany in 1851, and performed the duties of this chair with great ability until the end of the session of 1855, when he resigned that position.
Doctor William Stout Chipley Was born in Lexington, Kentucky, October 18, 1810, the only son of Reverend Stephen and Amelia Stout Chipley, the forefathers of both of whom were pioneers of Lexington. Doctor Chipley was graduated at Transylvania in 1832, with marked honor. Not a great while after his graduation he took issue with Doctor Benjamin Dudley, the oldest and most renowned practitioner of the State—or indeed of the whole country. Doctor Dudley had published a treatise upon the treatment of a special disease. Doctor Chipley took an opposite view, expressing himself most boldly and brilliantly. His article was published in an advanced medical journal and copied widely. Chipley received widespread encomiums. Indeed, he came off with raised banner, and his colors have never since been furled. His success was progressive this article exemplifying his determination when convinced he was right. Later he went to Columbus, Georgia, feeling assured it was a fine opening for a young practitioner, and so it proved. He was soon launched into an almost phenomenal practice, extending across the Chattahoochee River into Alabama to the Indian nation, where his wonderful magnetism was felt to such a degree that he won the confidence—even friendship—of these savages. He would be detained days at a time ministering to them—a tribe, too, by no means regarded as friendly to the whites. In April, 1837, he married in Columbus, Georgia, Elizabeth Fanning, niece and adopted daughter of Colonel James Fanning, of Alamo fame. Doctor Chipley was at one time Mayor of Columbus, and made a brilliant reputation as an executive officer. At the entreaties of his mother and father, who were quite advanced in age, he turned a deaf ear to the opposition of his legion of friends in Columbus and returned to Lexington, Kentucky, where it seemed a flourishing practice did but await him. He was a very successful Professor of Transylvania in the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine, from 1854 to 1857, inclusive. As a lecturer he had a wonderful flow of language. The possessor of a perfect voice and delivery, he chained the attention of all listeners. Often have I heard his patients say his sunshiny presence, his gentle, sympathetic touch in the sick-room, dulled pain and was better than drugs. He was a brilliant and forceful writer, the author of many medical works and the writer of numerous articles published in medical journals of the highest note. One small book of his gave him much notoriety. Chief Justice George Robertson, of Lexington, regarded it of such high worth that he gave fifteen hundred dollars to have it published and placed as a healthful guide in certain schools for boys. It was in 1855 that he took charge of the Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum at Lexington. This proved a wide field for the development of the most astonishing tact and management of individuals. The attendants greatly admired him and yielded without question to his dictation. Gentle as a woman, adamantine after a decision, never acting hastily, maturing a subject before deciding—these characteristics were shown on all occasions where it pertained to the comfort of the poor creatures under his care. During his fifteen or sixteen years of most successful management of this institution, he made many radical changes for the amelioration of the condition of these unfortunates. Winter after winter he haunted the legislative halls in behalf of the Asylum, spending his own personal means most lavishly to meet this end—presenting one bill after another, which sooner or later were always honored. His enthusiasm and faithfulness carried conviction with them. When he took charge of the Asylum he found it a conglomerate mass—many from other States there—incurables, epileptics, idiots—all huddled together. He went carefully over the records and proceeded to institute a thorough weeding. First he notified the governors of the respective States to send for their own insane, giving them a stated time of grace, and telling them that if the call was not honored he would send the patients to their doors by one of his own attendants, which he did in several instances. This systematizing was a great step forward. The next thing he did was to induce the State to erect an institution for idiots, believing there were few born who were not capable of receiving some degree of cultivation. In time a home was built at Frankfort, the result proving his great wisdom. It was a matter of wonderment to see these poor creatures developing from a driveling state of nonentity into some capacity for the enjoyment of life, and even to a degree of usefulness. There were but few incapable of being taught some employment which rendered their life more than a mere existence, akin alone to the lower animals. To have succeeded in this was enough to mark any man's life. His philanthropy never slept. Then, through his direct intervention, the Asylum at Anchorage for incurables was erected; all these changes making room for those who stood a chance of being cured instead of their being turned, for the lack of room, from the sheltering care which might restore them. I think his influence was brought to bear upon the advisability of an institution for the deaf and dumb, which culminated in the home made for them in Danville. I think it was in or about the year 1857 he went to Europe, absolutely for the purpose of gaining an insight into better ways and means of the treatment of the insane and the construction of the buildings which were their homes. Though there was such an emptying of the old Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum building, it soon became altogether insufficient to meet the demands. Applications poured in, and soon, after a hard-fought battle, the legislature made an appropriation to add to the old building, and promptly there was under construction a building which, when finished, for comfort and in a sanitary way was unequaled. This, years after his death, was destroyed by fire, and when rebuilt, I understand, was modeled after the old plan. He was his own architect, his whole heart and being merged in a desire to have all as nearly perfect as possible, developing thus a new talent. He always had in view a private asylum of his own. This purpose was crystallized when it became apparent that politics would govern the State institutions, though in opposition to all that was humane. He resigned December, 1869. He purchased "Duncannon," the beautiful Duncan home near Lexington. The site selected, lumber on the place, all plans formulated, having gained such advanced ideas from his long and successful experience he hoped to have an ideal shelter for those who preferred private treatment. On December 9, 1871, at eleven o'clock at night, snow on the ground, standing with his family and several whom even then he had under his charge around him, after barely escaping with their lives, he saw the "Duncannon" mansion reduced to ashes. This disaster crippled his efforts to the degree that he was forced to forego that which if carried through would have proven a monument to his memory of no small magnitude. He then rented a house in Lexington, where he had some patients under his charge, with a private attendant who had won many laurels in this capacity. Doctor Chipley was frequently called upon, even in other States, to decide in the courts as a specialist in insanity. He had a great number under his private treatment in their own homes, of whom the world never knew. He had innumerable offers of positions, but none seemed to appeal to him so much as one at College Hill, near Cincinnati, Ohio. He accepted this offer. His success here proved a very decided one, redeeming the institution from great financial stress and opening up astonishing possibilities. He had four sons—only one now living (1903)—and one daughter (the present writer). He left many friends in Lexington who were ever beckoning him back, and to the last he hoped to return where his heart was. But after only a few years of service at College Hill he contracted a cold from which he never recovered. He died February 11, 1880. Invitations had been issued for a reunion in honor of his aged mother, who was ninety-seven the day he died. A train was to be chartered and Lexington friends were to come. He has left a memory of his gathered laurels and honored name more precious than the gems of the universe.
Doctor James Morrison Bruce Was a son[98] of John Bruce, a Scottish gentleman associated with Colonel James Morrison and Benjamin Gratz in the manufacture of hemp at Lexington, Kentucky, and was born at that place in 1822. After completing a collegiate education, he studied medicine with Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, taking the degree of M. D. in Transylvania in 1843. He then spent three years in France, studying in the principal hospitals at Paris under the most eminent instructors. In 1846, he returned to Lexington to begin the practice of his profession. He was elected to the chair of Demonstrator of Anatomy in Transylvania Medical Department in 1850, continuing therein until the cessation of the school in 1857. Doctor Bruce's intrinsic merit was fully appreciated by his colleagues, who had great affection for him, but his excessively shrinking nature withheld him from taking the prominent position with the public to which his ability and learning entitled him. In truth, his chief characteristic was his modest, amiable, and retiring disposition. His specialty in medicine was eruptive disease. In the treatment of smallpox his professional brethren conceded him the highest place. For many years he was continuously elected City Physician, and holding this office he died, January 31, 1881, the sudden ending of his useful and kindly life being largely due to the exposure he so constantly and bravely encountered in his visits to the suffering poor during an unusually severe and trying winter. Says a fellow-physician,[99] "It was then that the great and good qualities of our friend and co-laborer, Doctor Bruce, shone pre-eminently. It was at a time when poverty and distress appealed to him that his great-heartedness, his forgetfulness of self, and his proficient medical skill forced itself before that public attention from which at all other times it timidly shrunk." Doctor Bruce married, in 1847, Miss Elizabeth Norton. Of his children Miss Elizabeth Bruce and Mrs. Charlotte B. Davis, of Lexington, survive him.
Doctor Alexander Keith Marshall, Born February 11, 1808, performed the duties of the chair of Materia Medica in 1856. He had received a classical education from his father, the celebrated Doctor Louis Marshall, of "Buck Pond"; studied medicine with Doctor Ephraim McDowell, and completed his medical course at Transylvania. He was a handsome man, a forcible speaker, a prominent politician and Odd Fellow, and a member of Congress in 1855. He died at the home of his son, Louis, near Lexington, April, 28, 1884.[100]
Benjamin P. Drake, M. D., A graduate of Transylvania Medical Department in 1830, occupied the chair of Materia Medica in the last year of the school in 1857.
During the last two years of the Medical Department of Transylvania University the Faculty were: Ethelbert L. Dudley, Surgery. James M. Bush, Anatomy. William S. Chipley, Theory and Practice. Samuel M. Letcher, Obstetrics, etc. Henry M. Skillman, Physiology and Institutes of Medicine. Alexander K. Marshall, Materia Medica and Botany, 1856. Benjamin P. Drake, Materia Medica and Botany, 1857. Robert Peter, Chemistry and Pharmacy; Dean. The Medical Hall TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY—MEDICAL HALL.
Built in 1839—Burned in 1863. From 1850 until the end in 1857, the existence of the school seems to have been an heroic struggle against fate. In spite of the fine Medical Hall, alluded to on the day of its dedication (November 2, 1840) by President Robert Davidson,[101] as "colossal in size and surpassing in architectural beauty," in spite of liberal endowments and "costly and complete apparatus, superior to any in the valley of the Mississippi, and not surpassed, if equaled, by any on the continent,"[102] the school languished. Notwithstanding the efforts of zealous Trustees and generous citizens, notwithstanding the diligence of an able Faculty, the classes steadily decreased from year to year until, in 1857, with only nine graduates, the Faculty in despair disbanded, and the time-honored Medical Department of Transylvania University was no more. Two factors more than all else (except as before mentioned, the impossibility of securing sufficient material for clinical instruction) had contributed to its demise—the retirement of Doctor Dudley in 1850, and the difficulty that existed in establishing the needed railroads throughout the State. The latter cause had been operating unfavorably and with increasing effect almost ever since the introduction of steam transportation.Enlightened thinkers had early recognized and urged the vital importance of railroads for Kentucky, and especially for Lexington and Transylvania, and had bravely advanced to conquer the difficulties of the situation, but with only discouragement and pecuniary loss for many years. The peculiar topography of the State, the constant alternation of hill and valley, the numerous streams, the hardness of the rock to be penetrated, made the building of railways very expensive, and capital was wanting. The wealth of Central Kentucky was in the soil, not in the purse, and without communication with the markets of the world this wealth was unavailable. In this manner enterprise was checked and Lexington sank into an apathetic state. It is true she had secured the distinction of having the first railroad in the West and the second in the United States,[103] but for years it only led to Frankfort, an interior town but twenty-eight miles distant. It was not until 1851 that it connected with Louisville. Of Doctor Dudley's influence upon the medical school Doctor David W. Yandell truly says:[104] "The history of the Medical Department of Transylvania University—its rise, its success, its decline, its disappearance from the list of medical colleges—would practically cover Doctor Dudley's career, and would form a most interesting chapter in the development of medical teaching in the Southwest. But it must suffice me here to say that Doctor Dudley created the medical department of the institution and directed its policy. Its students regarded him from the beginning as the foremost man in the Faculty. That he had colleagues whose mental endowments were superior to his he himself at all times freely admitted. He is said to have laid no claim to either oratorical power or professional erudition. He was not a logician, he was not brilliant, and his deliverances were spiced with neither humor nor wit. And yet, says one of his biographers, in ability to enchain the students' attention, to impress them with the value of his instructions and his greatness as a teacher, he bore off the palm from all the gifted men who at various periods taught at his side." But although these two would appear to be the more obvious reasons for the decline of the Medical Department of Transylvania, we can by no means ignore the injurious effect of rival medical colleges growing up at points more accessible and more progressive than Lexington could possibly be without rapid transit of some sort to make her own peculiar advantages available. Nor can we overlook the evil consequences of the opposition systematically shown to the Transylvania Medical School by the faction originating in the attempt to disorganize the institution in 1837. However, in reviewing all these influences, the prosperity of Lexington to-day (1904), her rapid growth, her increasing enterprise, her vigorous trade, the flourishing condition of her colleges and seminaries—all of which has come to her since the completion of the railroads centering in her—abundantly prove that this communication, above everything else, was her indispensable requirement. While the medical school was closed in 1857, the Academical Department of Transylvania University continued to be conducted at the Morrison College as a State Normal School,[105] under the Presidency of the distinguished Doctor Lewis W. Green, D. D., but was soon to be disorganized, after only two years of usefulness, on account of a supposed unconstitutionality. Thus Transylvania was again humbled to a low estate in educational distinction. Lexington herself was suffering an era of banishment, as we may say, for without proper railroad connections she was excluded from progress and rendered inaccessible to both labor and capital. The financial prosperity of her citizens was not such as to warrant the lavish hospitality formerly shown to strangers within her gates, and especially to the students in Transylvania. The enterprising individuals who remained to her were not sufficient in numbers to dispel by their most strenuous exertions the lethargy which had fallen upon the place. Such was the state of affairs immediately preceding the Civil War. The immense Medical Hall had reverted to the city and was deserted, save the laboratory in which was still being busily conducted the chemical work of the first Geological Survey of Kentucky; and save perhaps one of the smaller rooms, rented to a lodger. The survey had just received a sudden check in the death of the lamented Doctor Owen when the war still further darkened the prospect, during which, as a matter of course, the resumption of the survey was out of the question. The Morrison College was almost immediately appropriated by the United States Government for a general hospital, and, some time after, the Medical Hall, which as before mentioned was utterly destroyed by fire[106] during its occupation by the sick soldiers. The conflagration originated, it appeared, from a defective flue of a temporary frame kitchen, built adjoining.[107] The corner-stone of this Medical Hall had been laid July 4, 1839; Robert Wickliffe, junior, the well-beloved, making the address. It was dedicated November 2, 1840. Of Grecian architecture, massive and without ornamentation, it contained three great lecture rooms, with ample provision for light and ventilation. The amphitheatre was immediately below the cupola, being by this means lighted from above. There were three other large apartments—for the library, the anatomical museum, and for other medical teaching. Smaller rooms accommodated the laboratory, Faculty room, janitor's room, etc. Besides which were long halls or galleries utilized for natural history collections, museums of zoology, ornithology, geology, etc., as also for apparatus of divers sorts. The costly and complete chemical apparatus was well displayed and conveniently arranged in the immense lecture room for that department. Medical Hall's Janitor ABSOLOM DRIVER.
For many years Janitor at the Medical Hall of Transylvania University. In the spacious lecture-room in the front of the building many fashionable and distinguished audiences had assembled on various occasions, not only to hear the gifted incumbent professors in due discourse of introductory or valedictory, but to be charmed with concerts by Ole Bull, Strakosch, Adelina Patti—who sang there on her first tour in this country—and other celebrities of the period. There the learned Guyot had instructed in geology; there unique "Tom Marshall" had uniquely delivered a unique course of lectures on History. Over the rostrum hung the portrait of Doctor Samuel Brown—the first medical professor. This lecture hall was lighted for evening assemblages, from the sides mostly, by "scounches," as they were called by the "ole Virginny" negro janitor. This factotum, "Absolom Driver," is unforgotten by any whose path some time ran parallel with his. For many years the keeper of the Medical Hall, his zeal and vigilance were unimpeachable, his dignified solemnity on state occasions unsurpassed. Contemptuous of letters—except for doctors—and with unshakable prejudice against "book learnin' for niggers," he was faithful in trusts with the matchless fidelity of the dog. "Bad boys"—the problem of philosophers and ordinary folk in all ages—was one of easy solution by "Uncle Absolom" with a bent nail at the end of a long pole. Charged upon with elan with this unprecedented weapon, accompanied by an ominous war-cry, no truant could withstand, even though the artfully strewn broken bottles on the high back fence had been successfully outflanked. "Robbers" had their everlasting antidote at hand in the peculiarly uncanny, long, "one-barreled shotgun" with curious lock, which stood in the corner of the Faculty room. Nobody ever heard it "go off," but the mystery of it was what appalled one. Happily "Uncle Absolom's" death was nearly coeval with the closing of the medical school. To have witnessed the burning of his sacred temple, the Medical Hall, after all his "keer," would have broken his heart indeed. And now, bidding adieu to the shades of the grand old Transylvania Medical Department, conjured from the past by one now numbered with them, may the earnest wish be permitted with hope of realization, that some other hand with cunning in such craft will unveil to us the portraits of that bygone throng of brilliant men which constituted and which were the exponents of the honored Transylvania Law School.
|
