Part 3

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. 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.

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."

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, 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. 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, 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. 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.

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.

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.