Читать книгу The History of the Medical Department of Transylvania University - Robert Drummond Peter - Страница 12

Was born in Spottsylvania County, Virginia, April 12, 1785. His father, a leading Baptist minister in Kentucky, Ambrose Dudley, had commanded a company in the Revolutionary War, and removed to the neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky, when his son Benjamin was little more than a year old, and to that city in 1797. Here, reared with such tuition as the schools of the day and the country afforded, Benjamin was placed while yet very young under the medical tutelage of Doctor Frederick Ridgely, then an eminent physician in large practice in Lexington, under whose instruction his ardent taste for medical knowledge was largely gratified. In the autumn of 1804 he went to the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and was there fellow-student with Daniel Drake, John Esten Cooke, and William H. Richardson, his subsequent colleagues in the Medical Department of Transylvania University.

Returning to Lexington at the close of the medical lectures at Philadelphia, he engaged in the practice of physic and surgery with Doctor Fishback during the spring and summer months of 1805. He returned to the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine from that institution March, 1806, just two weeks before he was twenty-one years of age.

Desirous of perfecting his medical education in Europe, after a few years' further practice in Lexington he descended the Ohio River on a flatboat to New Orleans in 1810, just one year before the first experimental steamboat was launched upon those waters. At New Orleans he purchased a cargo of flour and sailed on a prosperous voyage to Gibraltar, and after advantageously disposing of his cargo at that place and at Lisbon, he made his way through Spain to Paris. After four years spent in Europe zealously and industriously employing all the great facilities of the hospitals, dissecting-rooms, and eminent instructors of Paris and London, and after traveling six months in Italy and Switzerland, he finally returned to Lexington in the summer of 1814, conscious of innate powers and ardently devoted to his profession.

DOCTOR BENJAMIN W. DUDLEY.

From a Portrait by Jouett owned by Mrs. Robert Peter.

Professor Dudley continued to lecture until 1850, when he resigned and was appointed Professor Emeritus. Doctor James M. Bush succeeded him in the chair of Anatomy, and Dudley's nephew, Ethelbert L. Dudley, took that of Surgery, which he filled with great success.

A schedule of the succession of the Professors of this Medical School will best illustrate the changes which occurred since 1819. (See Schedule A.)

Professor B. W. Dudley remained in the regular performance of the duties of his double chair—Anatomy and Surgery[15]—with the able assistance of Doctor J. M. Bush, until 1844, when Doctor Bush was regularly appointed Professor of Anatomy. Doctor Dudley, as above mentioned, retained the chair of Surgery until 1850. In that year the Medical Faculty intermitted the winter session in Lexington, with the consent of the Trustees, in order to establish the "Kentucky School of Medicine" in Louisville as a winter school, retaining the Transylvania Medical College as a summer school. Doctor Dudley's last course of lectures was delivered in the session of 1849–50.

Simultaneously with the resignation of his professorship, he withdrew from his extensive practice and retired to his beautiful suburban residence, "Fairlawn," in the vicinity of Lexington.[16] His death occurred in Lexington on the twentieth of January, 1870, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.

Doctor Dudley was an earnest and laborious practical man. His whole time and energies were devoted to his profession, in which, like the celebrated John Hunter—the one of his early preceptors Dudley most admired—he sought instruction in the book of nature—in his practice—rather than in the written archives of science.

As a teacher and lecturer he was admirably clear and impressive. While no attempt at eloquence was ever made by him, and no early training or later readings in the classics gave ornament to his style, his terse and impressive sentences, as they were delivered apparently without the slightest effort or premeditation as also without hesitation or interruption, were the embodiment of the ideas to be conveyed, in the most lucid and concise language. It seemed impossible to use fewer or more appropriate words to convey to the least appreciative student the subject to be taught.

This, with his great practical skill as a surgeon, his minute and ready knowledge, his great experience, his unequaled success in his numerous operations, his suavity and dignity of manner, the magnanimity and liberality of his character, and his eminent devotedness to his profession, made his students most earnest admirers and followers and aided greatly in the establishment and maintenance of our Medical College.

Although possessed of the firmest nerves, so that his hand never faltered in the severest operation,[17] his sensibility was so keen that he sometimes suffered from nervous prostration after the strain was over. Many of his pupils no doubt recollect with what feeling—manifested even by tears—he recited the sufferings and dangers of a patient of his who was the subject of obstinate secondary hemorrhage.

It was as a practical surgeon that Doctor Dudley justly attained a world-wide reputation, and especially as a successful operator in lithotomy. This operation he performed two hundred and twenty-five times, without losing a single patient until after his one hundredth operation, losing in the whole of his operations only about two per cent. So celebrated had he become for this operation as early as 1827 that the Kentucky Gazette for April 11, of that year, records that he operated three times for stone in one day.

He always performed the lateral operation with the gorget, and never until by previous preparation—by diet and medicine—he had brought the system of his patient to a proper state.[18]

Then, with good nursing under his immediate direction in wholesome private lodging, the incision healed up by the first intention. Although the stone may have been so large that much effort was required to withdraw it through the incision—sometimes even attended with laceration—the patient was on his feet again in a surprisingly short period of time. The Doctor justly attached great importance to the preliminary constitutional preparation of his surgical patients.

A notice of two of his earliest operations of this kind is given in the Kentucky Gazette for Saturday, November 19, 1817. The one—the first he performed in Lexington—on Mr. S. Owen, of that place, and the other, "some time ago," on a little boy in Paris, Kentucky, which, according to Doctor C. C. Graham—who was his pupil at that time—was the first operation for stone performed by Doctor Dudley. He never used lithotrity or seemed to approve of that operation.

Another surgical specialty was his great use of judicious and regulated pressure by means of the roller bandage in the cure of abscesses, in the control of inflammation, in the treatment of fractures, aneurisms, etc. No surgeon probably ever used it so extensively or so successfully. Few, even of his pupils, seemed to be able to apply it with the skill and judgment which characterized their preceptor.

He was also an earnest advocate of the patient use of hot water—as hot as could be borne—in the control of inflammation. Where other surgeons resorted to poultices he applied hot water.

He was not ready with his pen; because, probably, of early neglect in the practice of composition. What he wrote was mostly at the urgent solicitation of his colleagues, and for the columns of The Transylvania Journal of Medicine, a quarterly which first appeared in Lexington February, 1828.[19] It was then edited by his colleagues, Professors Cooke and Short; subsequently by Professor Yandell, then by Professor Peter, more lately by Professor T. D. Mitchell, and lastly by Professor Ethelbert L. Dudley.

In the first volume of this Journal appeared Doctor Dudley's first paper, a most remarkable article, showing by cases in his practice that epilepsy may be caused by pressure on the brain, the consequence of fracture of the skull, and, as demonstrated by five successive operations, might be cured by trephining, a fact and experience in surgery then entirely new, for which Doctor Dudley is entitled to the honor of discovery and demonstration.

In the same paper is communicated a novel and successful method of treatment of fungus cerebri, by means of dried sponge compresses. Doctor Dudley stated that by this means he had cured fungus cerebri within the space of five days.

In a second paper, in the next number of this volume, he gives an original and successful operation for hydrocele. In the fourth number he began an extensive article on his peculiar uses of the roller bandage in gunshot wounds, fractures, etc., which he continued through several volumes of the Journal. In the second volume he had given an interesting article on the use of the roller bandage in the treatment of ulcers, contusions, lacerations, effusions, etc. In the fifth volume he continued his remarks on epilepsy as treated by the trephine. In volume sixth he published a record of his experience in the treatment of Asiatic cholera in Lexington. In the ninth he continued his observations on the bandage and its very successful application in the treatment of fractures. A most interesting and valuable article on Calculous Diseases from his pen appeared in the same volume, illustrating not only his great practical skill but his courage and quick and clear judgment in cases of emergency. Volumes ten and twelve contained reports of his operations in lithotomy; volume eleven, a paper on Fractures and Calculous Diseases.

In the elegant and generally correct Memoir of Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, published by the late Lunsford P. Yandell, M. D., in the American Practitioner, 1870, these are stated to be the only writings of our late distinguished surgeon; but Doctor Dudley subsequently published three elaborate and highly valuable surgical papers, to wit:

1. On the Treatment of Aneurism, published in the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, edited by Professor Ethelbert L. Dudley, July, 1849.

2. On the Treatment of Gunshot Wounds. Ibid., December, 1849.

3. On the Treatment of Fractures by the Roller Bandage. Ibid., 1850.

This journal was a bi-weekly publication, the successor of the old Transylvania Medical Journal above mentioned.

These were the latest productions of Doctor B. W. Dudley. Engaged as he continually was in a daily round of engrossing surgical and medical practice, lecturing twice a day in the Medical School during its sessions, there was left to him but little time for the record or promulgation of his ample experience by his pen.

As a medical practitioner also he was original. He was among the first to discard the lancet in his treatment of disease. He used instead small doses of tartar emetic, or more recently, of ipecacuanha frequently repeated, with low diet; or cholagogue purgatives combined with ipecacuanha, etc. He confined himself to but few medicines, but in the application of these, and of diet and regimen, his clear and correct judgment was usually apparent. Polypharmacy he despised. New remedies were looked upon by him with incredulity and suspicion. Quinine, iodine, and other novelties in his time never were accorded approbation by him.

As a man and a citizen he was eminently liberal, charitable, magnanimous, public-spirited, and energetic. He bound his friends to him with the strongest ties and treated his hostile enemies—who were few—with a cordial hatred. His sense of honor and personal dignity was very delicate and high. No one so deeply despised a mean action. No one so readily forgave an injury which was confessed.

An exemplification of his character was given in 1817–18. A difficulty having originated between himself and Doctor Drake, in relation to the resignation of the latter and some matters connected with a post-mortem examination of an Irishman who had been killed in a quarrel, sharp pamphlets passed between them and a challenge to mortal combat from Dudley to Drake, which the latter declined, but which was vicariously accepted by his next friend, Doctor William H. Richardson. A duel resulted in which, at the first fire, Richardson was seriously wounded in the groin by the ball of Dudley, severing the inguinal artery. Richardson would have speedily bled to death—as it could not be controlled by the tourniquet—but for the ready skill and magnanimity of Dudley. He immediately asked permission of his adversary to arrest the hemorrhage, and by the pressure with his thumb over the ilium gave time for the application of the ligature by the surgeon of Richardson—thus converting his deadly antagonist into a lifelong friend.

Notwithstanding Doctor Dudley had contributed tens of thousands to public improvement and to private charities, and never regularly kept accounts against his patients, he acquired a considerable fortune. His latter days were passed in the society of his children and grandchildren in the household of his son, the late William A. Dudley, surrounded by all the comforts which a large competency and a devoted family could provide. Thus, in the quiet of domestic retirement, passed away the last days of a most active and eminently useful and distinguished life.[20]

The annals of the earlier efforts to establish medical education and a medical college in connection with Transylvania University—the first in the whole West and the second in the United States—are meager and unsatisfactory.

As already stated, the first Medical Professors in this University—Doctors Samuel Brown and Frederick Ridgely (1799)—no doubt taught and lectured occasionally to such students as were present. The files of the old Kentucky Gazette show that Doctor James Fishback, who was unanimously appointed to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in Transylvania in 1805, advertised to lecture, and did probably lecture on these subjects. But he resigned in 1806. Doctor James Overton, who had been appointed to the chair of Materia Medica and Botany in 1809, said in his letter of acceptance (on the occasion of his reappointment in the reorganization of the Medical Faculty in 1817) that he "had engaged for some time in giving lectures on Theory and Practice in this town," etc.

According to the best recollection of the late Doctor Coleman Rogers—for a long time before his death a resident in Louisville—the Medical College of Transylvania University was reorganized in 1815 by the appointment of the following Faculty:

Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery.

Doctor Coleman Rogers, adjunct to this chair.

Doctor James Overton, Theory and Practice.

Doctor William H. Richardson, Obstetrics, etc.

Doctor Thomas Cooper (Judge Cooper), of Pennsylvania, to the chair of Chemistry, Mineralogy, etc.

Doctor James Blythe, then acting President of the University, was to give chemical instruction. Doctor Cooper and Doctor Rogers did not accept this appointment. According to Doctor Rogers' recollection a regular course of lectures was not delivered by this Faculty, although Doctors Dudley and Overton probably both lectured or taught "as they previously had done."[21]

Doctor Dudley's own recollection, as detailed to the present writer, was also that he and Doctor Overton, as well as Doctor Blythe, lectured in 1815–16 to about twenty students, of whom the late Doctor Ayres and the yet surviving Nestor of Transylvania graduates, Doctor Christopher C. Graham, of Louisville—now almost a centenarian[22]—were in attendance as pupils. Very little can now be ascertained, from existing records, of the character of Professor James Overton, M. D. Doctor Christopher C. Graham, in a recent letter to the writer, gives some of his reminiscences of him in the following language: "Doctor Overton was a small, black-eyed man, very hypochondrical and sarcastic (notoriously so), and yet quite chatty, humorous, and agreeable; telling his class many funny things.... He was well educated for his day and plumed himself especially on his Greek." Doctor Overton removed from Lexington to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1818.[23]