Part 3 (1/2)
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., publis.h.i.+ng 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 ma.n.u.script 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, subst.i.tuting 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, princ.i.p.ally, of the medical students, it was, after the departure from Lexington of Rafinesque, finally p.r.o.nounced 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 Inst.i.tutes 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.
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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DANIEL DRAKE, M. D.]
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 professors.h.i.+p 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s at the commencement of the session the first of November.
”In an excavation made in the corner-stone was deposited a gla.s.s 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 a.s.sisted 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 bas.e.m.e.nt story of the building is chiefly appropriated to the chemical professors.h.i.+p 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 surpa.s.sed in point of excellence of light for demonstration, or in ease, comfort, and convenience to the pupil by any similar inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sociation 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.