Chapter 5

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.

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]

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]