Part 5 (1/2)
”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 Inst.i.tution at Was.h.i.+ngton, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DOCTOR CHARLES WILKINS SHORT.]
His lectures to the medical students on Materia Medica and Medical Botany he always read from his ma.n.u.script, 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 Inst.i.tute 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 cla.s.sical 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 Inst.i.tute 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]
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute, of which Mr. Peers was princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sist 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 Inst.i.tute, 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, circ.u.mstances 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 pastors.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sical 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 a.s.semblies 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.