Transylvania University

“ Winter session.
Thus the records show that in thirty-nine years of the existence of the Medical Department of Transylvania University it taught six thousand four hundred and fifty-six pupils and conferred the degree of Doctor of Medicine on one thousand eight hundred and eighty-one of that number. The late Professor Thomas D. Mitchell, in speaking of its record, made the following remark: "That for its vigorous prosperity and the rapid increase of its classes, the medical school of Transylvania is without a parallel. Certainly in the United States there is nothing comparable to it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Transylvania, and included the State Agricultural and Mechanical College, Doctor Peter occupied the chair of Chemistry and Experimental Philosophy in the new University, lecturing daily in two colleges, having declined the Presidency of the Agricultural and Mechanical College, which was offered him by Regent Bowman. At this period he devoted his every energy of mind and body to assist in the upbuilding of what he fondly hoped would be the great educational institution of the West and South ”

“ 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 a work like this the essence of its history is biographic, and Doctor Peter has made his work to consist chiefly of biographical sketches of those who made Transylvania University what it was. He gives the leading facts in the life of each of the professors he sketches, and enumerates [Pg x] the other colleges in which they occupied chairs, and gives the titles of the works they published either in book form or magazine articles. He omits nothing in the sketch that is necessary in forming a just idea of the character portrayed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He was graduated from Transylvania university with the degree of B.A., and after taking a post-graduate course was given the degree of M.A. At the age of twenty-one the death of his father necessitated his earning the support of his mother and sister by teaching in public schools, and later as a private tutor. For two years he was tutor in Transylvania university, leaving to accept the chair of Latin and higher English in Bethany college, West Virginia. There he remained two years, and then went to New York city to devote his life to literature. ”

“ We revere it as the first medical college on this side of the Alleghanies. We revere it for the efforts it made to prepare our young physicians to cope with the diseases that afflicted our people. We revere it for the good name it gave our State in the fame it acquired. We revere it for the success of Professor Brown in introducing vaccination in advance of its discoverer, for the brilliant and numerous operations in lithotomy by Professor Dudley, and for the noble efforts of others of its professors in prolonging human life and mitigating its pains. ”

“ That full preparation and training, in a sufficient period of time, shall be required of the candidates into whose hands the health and lives of communities are to be committed. On such a basis—when our city may have acquired increased facilities for clinical instruction, and when anatomical studies will not be cramped for want of means of demonstration—the old Medical College of Transylvania may revive under the wing of a people's educational institution such as Transylvania is and always was—a "State University." ”

“ The same year, October 13, 1828: "The Board joined in a procession to the Episcopal Church, where the Reverend Alva Woods, D. D., was publicly installed as President of the Transylvania University." One thousand copies of his inaugural address to be printed for the Board.
[39] Edward Everett, in a letter of introduction to Sir Walter Scott presented to Mr. Holley when intending to visit Europe, says of him: "As a philosopher, a scholar, and a gentleman he has left no superior in America."
[40] See Pages 405–7, Autobiography of Doctor Charles Caldwell. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We can not, like our English cousins, go back along the pathway of centuries to the [Pg xi] colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and revere them for their age; we have nothing in our new country that partakes of such age. We are a young people in a young country, and our Transylvania Medical College was old enough from our standpoint to be crowned with hoary years. ”

“ 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, [Pg 12] did not long occupy this chair, and appears not to have lectured in it. ”

“ After hearing numerous lectures by famous doctors, and after visiting the model hospitals, etc., of the day, he writes to his wife (Paris, June 27, 1839) : "We can have as great men [in Lexington] as either of those cities [London and Paris] , and neither of them contains a man as eminent in surgery as Doctor Dudley"; and from London, August 11, 1839: "We have bought a great many fine books and a great deal of excellent apparatus and anatomical and other models. Transylvania will shine. No other institution in our part of the world will be able to compare with her in the means of instruction. ”

“ Our city has steadily risen to about seventeen thousand (1873) , with a good prospect of a further increase of prosperity and population as railroads centering here may be extended. Then may we hope to put into active operation once more our time-honored Medical College, and to attract to it a creditable number of students. More [Pg 61] particularly if, with the co-operation of the more enlightened members of our profession, an effort be faithfully made in the renovated college to bring about the much-needed reform in medical education, the necessity for which is now generally recognized. ”

“ In fact, I have seen none in Europe that is more completely prepared to teach modern medicine." [67]
Daguerre, in 1839, had just published the process of his wonderful art, and it constituted perhaps the greatest novelty in Paris at the time of the sojourn there of [Pg 92] Doctor Bush and Doctor Peter; so along with the apparatus for Transylvania was brought to Lexington a daguerreotype outfit which surely must have been the first ever seen in that city, if not the first ever used in the West. ”

“ In 1831 my name was before the Trustees of Jefferson Medical College for the chair of Materia Medica vacated by the resignation of Dr. Eberle, and I would have been appointed, as I have since been informed by Gen. Duncan, one of the Trustees, if I had not agreed to join with Dr. Eberle a new faculty at Cincinnati. If any object that a Prof'r of Chemistry can not make a good Prof'r of Theory and Practice, I have only to refer to the case of the celebrated Dr. Rush, who passed directly from Chemistry to Theory and Practice, as the published records of the University of Penna. will show. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But with this [Pg 104] complete mastery of science there was no corresponding lack of business ability. More than once he was offered civic honors—vainly, however. Once he agreed to act as City Councilman, but summarily resigned because the Council unjustly denied to respectable colored citizens the right to establish a public school for negroes in Lexington—a refusal we can not understand to-day. He was ever ready to give time, labor, and money to public education and improvement ”

“ This duty he performed to the highest satisfaction of all concerned; and when, almost at the beginning of the next regular session (1847–48) , he was called to the chair of Anatomy and Physiology, he successfully encountered the great labor of preparing and delivering a new course of lectures on these subjects. At the same time he also discharged the arduous duties of Demonstrator of Anatomy—duties more onerous in this school, in our small inland city, than in most other medical colleges. No one in the whole school accomplished half the work which he mastered. ”

“ He was too modest to trust himself to oral discourses. [56] Yet [Pg 81] 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. ”

“ There were three other large apartments—for the library, the anatomical museum, and for other medical teaching. Smaller rooms accommodated the laboratory, Faculty room, janitor's room, etc. Besides which were long halls or galleries utilized for natural history collections, museums of zoology, ornithology, geology, etc., as also for apparatus of divers sorts. The costly and complete chemical apparatus was well displayed and conveniently arranged in the immense lecture room for that department. ”

“ Joseph Megowan, at the rate of one hundred dollars in specie per acre, with a small rent of two dollars and fifty cents per acre until paid."
[33] Doctor Best, a graduate of Transylvania Medical Department in 1826, died at Lexington, Kentucky, September, 1830, aged about forty-five years.
[34] Of Doctor Drake, Doctor S. D. Gross says: "Emphatically a self-made man, he possessed genius of a superior order and successfully coped with his colleagues for the highest place in the school (Transylvania) . ”

“ Before I had ever been out of Transylvania, and while I belonged either to one party or the other, I was convinced that all the adherents of my party were worthy men but those on the opposite side were worth nothing. ”

“ They, like the Roman patricians of the early centuries, gave the security of their halls to their co-religionists, and the heads of the Romanist Church chafed at their impotence to prevent the spread of opinions and usages which they deemed heretical. In Transylvania the absence of a strong central government permitted the same freedom to the expression of every variety of religious opinion.
The views held by the group of anti-Trinitarians were by no means the same. They reproduced in Poland the same medley of views we find existing in the end of the third century. ”

“ On the west or Hungarian side there are various wide and comparatively easy passes into the interior, but on the east and south frontiers the lofty bounding mountains present steep and rugged faces outwards, giving to Transylvania the general aspect of a huge natural fortress. These mountains are a continuation of the Hungarian and Galician Carpathians; in fact, the mountains of Transylvania may be regarded together as forming the south eastern main group of the Carpathian system. The loftiest and most rugged peaks are on the north and south boundaries. ”

“ Like me his chief pecuniary resource was a college fellowship. Now, Trevanion had established a high reputation at the university; but less as a scholar, though a pretty fair one, than as a man to rise in life. Every faculty he had was an energy. He aimed at every thing—lost some things, gained others. ”

“ Transylvania is completely hemmed in by the South-Eastern Carpathians, besides being cut up by them, and its people are mountaineers, looking with disdain on the dwellers in the level plain. To them life without heights and hollows, and the constant sense of watchful grandeur given by rising peaks, would be tame and colourless. The mountaineer’s muscles are wrought to india-rubber by continual change of action. ”