Читать книгу The History of the Medical Department of Transylvania University - Robert Drummond Peter - Страница 8

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The history of medicine and of the earliest medical men in Kentucky clusters around the name of Transylvania University.

The State of Virginia, in 1780—when "Kan-tuck-ee" or "Kentuckee," as this country was then called, was only a little-explored portion of that State—placed eight thousand acres of escheated lands within that county into the hands of thirteen trustees "for the purposes of a public school or seminary of learning," that they "might at a future day be a valuable fund for the maintenance and education of youth; it being the interest of this Commonwealth always to promote and encourage every design which might tend to the improvement of the mind and the diffusion of knowledge, even amongst the most remote citizens, whose situation a barbarous neighborhood and a savage intercourse might otherwise render unfriendly to science."

Three years thereafter (1783), when Kentucky had become a district of Virginia, the General Assembly, by a new amendatory Act, re-endowed this "public school" with twelve thousand acres more of escheated lands and gave to it all the privileges, powers, and immunities of "any college or university in the State," under the name of "Transylvania Seminary."

In the wild and sparsely settled country this seminary began a feeble existence under the special fostering care and patronage of the Presbyterians, who were then a leading religious body, aided by individual subscriptions and by additional State endowments.

The Reverend James Mitchel, a Presbyterian minister, was its first "Grammar Master," in 1785. In 1789 it was placed under the charge of Mr. Isaac Wilson and located in Lexington, with no more than thirteen pupils all told. The Reverend James Moore, educated for the Presbyterian ministry but subsequently an Episcopalian and first Rector of Christ Church, Lexington, was appointed "Director," or the first acting President of the Transylvania Seminary, in 1791.[1] He taught in his own house for want of a proper seminary building, with the aid of a small library and collection of philosophical apparatus. This library and apparatus had been donated by the Reverend John Todd, of Virginia, who, with other influential Presbyterians, had been mainly instrumental in procuring the charters and endowments from the General Assembly of Virginia.

The offer of a lot of ground in the town of Lexington[2] to the trustees of Transylvania Seminary, by a company of gentlemen calling themselves the "Transylvania Land Company," induced the trustees to permanently locate the seminary in that place in 1793. On that lot the first school and college buildings were placed, and on it was afterward erected the more commodious University edifice in which taught the learned and celebrated President, Doctor Horace Holley. This first University building was destroyed by fire May 9, 1829. In later years (1879) this old "College lot" was beautified and improved by tree-planting and otherwise by liberal citizens of Lexington, moved by the efforts of Mr. H. H. Gratz, and designated first "Centennial Park,"[3] and afterward "Gratz Park," in honor of Benjamin Gratz, being not now utilized for special educational purposes.

With limited success the first "Director of Transylvania Seminary" taught in Lexington until 1794, when he was superseded by the election by the Board of Trustees of Mr. Harry Toulmin as first President of the Seminary.

This gentleman, a learned Unitarian minister of the school of Doctor Priestly, and a native of England, resigned the Presidency in 1796, and was Secretary of State of Kentucky under Governor Garrard. (See Collins' History of Kentucky, volume 2, page 184.)

Intense feeling at the election of Mr. Toulmin on the part of the leading Presbyterians, who claimed the Seminary as their own peculiar institution, caused them to obtain in 1796 a charter from the Legislature of Kentucky—now a State—for a new institution of learning which they could more exclusively control. This was the "Kentucky Academy," of which the Reverend James Blythe, of their communion, was made President.[4]

On the establishment of the Kentucky Academy by the dissatisfied Presbyterians in 1796, an active rivalry between that school and Transylvania Seminary operated to the injury of both institutions as well as to the cause of education in general. Therefore, after two years of separate existence these two institutions, with the consent of the trustees of both, were united in 1798 by Act of the General Assembly of Kentucky into one, "for the promotion of public good and learning," under the title of Transylvania University. The consolidation was made under the original laws which governed the Transylvania Seminary as enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia.