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."
[Illustration: 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.,