History of Cincinnati, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 80

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co.
Number of Pages: 666

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HISTORY OF CINCINNATI, OHIO.

While these various projects were keeping the doctor's imagination in a state of high and pleasurable excitement, he became enamored with the Mad River country, to which, in the very infancy of its settlement, he made a winter visit. Beyond where Urbana has since been built was the Indian village of Mechacheek, at which he arrived at night, ex- pecting to find inhabitants ; but found none. Being without the means of kindling a fire, and unable to travel back in the dark, he came nigh perishing from the cold. Subsequently he made another visit in the month of June; and took me with him. It required four days to reach King's creek, a few miles beyond the present Urbana, which then had one house and Springfield another. The natural scenery, after passing the village of Dayton, was of such exquisite beauty that I was not sur- prised at the doctor's fascination; but a residence there was not in store for him-he had a different destiny.

The time at length arrived when young Cincinnati was to lose the most popular and peculiar physician who had appeared in the ranks of her infant profession, or indeed ever belonged to it; and the motives and manner of the separation were in keeping with his general char- acter.

The French Revolution of 1789 had exiled many educated and ac- complished men and women, several of whom found their way into the new settlements of the west. The doctor's political sympathies were with the Revolutionists ; but some of the exiles reached the town of Washington, where he resided, and their manners and sufferings .tri- umphed over his repugnance to aristocracy, till pictures of the beauty and elegance of French society began to fill his imagination. Thus im- pressed he came to Cincinnati, where Masonry soon made him ac- quainted with an exiled lawyer of Paris, who resided on the corner of Main and Third streets, where the banking edifice of the Trust com- pany now stands. This gentleman, M. Menessier, planted the vine- yard of which I have spoken and carried on a bakery in the lower story of his house, while the upper was the lodge room of Nova Caesarea Har- mony No. 2. The doctor's association with this member of the beau monde of course raised his admiration for Gallic politeness still higher ; and just at the time when he began, in feeling, to prefer French to Anglo-American society, President Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Bonaparte, first consul of the Republique Francaise. The en- chanting prairies of Mad River were now forgotten, and he began to prepare for a southern migration. Early in the spring of 1807 he de- parted in a flat-boat for the coasts and bayous of the Lower Mississippi, where he was soon appointed a parish judge, and subsequently elected by the creoles of Attakapas to represent them in forming the first Con- stitution of the State of Louisiana ; soon after which he removed to New Orleans. During the invasion of that city by the British he acted as surgeon to one of the regiments of Louisiana volunteers. By this time his taste for French manners had been satisfied, and he determined to return to the city which he had left in opposition to the wishes of all his friends and patients. On the first of May, 1816, he left New Orleans, with his family, on a keel-boat ; and on the twenty-eighth of the next December, after a voyage of eight months, he reached our landing. He immediately re-acquired business; but in the following spring he sank under hepatitis, contracted by his summer sojourn on the river.

Many years after Dr. Drake uttered his reminiscences of Dr. Goforth, the Hon. E. D. Mansfield, at a meeting of the Cincinnati Pioneer society, submitted some of his recollections, which were thus briefly reported for the press :

The speaker gave some of the characteristics and experiences of the pioneer doctors and lawyers. Dr. Goforth, of Cincinnati, was a gentle- man of the old school ; he wore a powdered wig, and carried a gold- headed cane. The doctor, like others of his profession, would ride five, eight, or ten miles of a dark night, to visit a patient, 'and receive, with- out complaint, the regular price of a visit-feed for his horse, and a cut quarter in cash. Dr. Goforth emigrated to Louisiana, and wrote a long letter to the senior Mansfield, in which, among other things, he said that "if ever there was a hell upon earth, New Orleans was the place."

DOCTOR DRAKE.

The first student of medicine in Cincinnati was the same Dr. Daniel Drake' who came to the town from the wilds of Kentucky, in 1800, a boy of fifteen, to become a physician. He entered the office of Dr. Goforth, which was also a drug store, and remained nearly four years,

most of the time compounding and dispensing medi- cines, while he read ponderous books in the intervals. Long afterward he recalled his experience of this village drug store in these remarks:

But few of you have seen the genuine old doctor's shop or regaled your olfactory nerves in the mingled odors which, like incense to the god of physic, arose from brown paper bundles, bottles stopped with worm eaten corks, and open jars of ointment not a whit behind those of the apothecary in the days of Solomon. Yet such a place is very well for the student. However idle, he will always be absorbing a little medicine, especially if he sleep beneath the greasy counter.

In May, 1804, young Drake began practice in partner- ship with Dr. Goforth, and in about two months was able to write hopefully to his father that their business was rapidly increasing, and that they entered as much as three to six dollars per day upon their books, though he wisely doubted whether a quarter of it would ever be collected. . In the fall of 1805, poor as he still was, he resolved to seek larger advantages of professional educa- tion, and pushed to Philadelphia as a student in Penn- sylvania university. He had not money enough to take a ticket at the Hospital library, and had to borrow books ; but studied and heard lectures nearly eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and got on rapidly. He came back to Cincinnati the next spring, practiced at the old home in Mayslick, Kentucky, for a year, and then made his final residence in this city.' In 1815 he returned to finish his course in the University of Pennsylvania, when he was thirty years old, and received his degree the follow- ing spring, the first of any kind bestowed by that institu- tion upon a Cincinnatian. Young Drake had before received a unique autograph diploma, given him by his preceptor upon his first departure for Philadelphia in 1805, setting forth his ample attainments in all branches of the profession, and signed by Goforth with his proper title, but unusual in such connection, as "surgeon-gen- eral of the First division of Ohio militia." It was con- sidered by Dr. Drake to be the first medical diploma ever granted in the Mississippi valley. Drake, after his graduation in 1816, had before him a long, honorable, and highly useful career, which is noticed in part under other heads. He was early called away from the full practice of his profession by the demands upon him for medical teaching here and elsewhere. The Medical College of Ohio was the creation, in the first instance, of Dr. Drake, who did much in his day for Cincinnati and for medical science. While yet a young man, in 1817, he was called to a professorship in the medical depart- ment of the Transylvania university, at Lexington, and spent one winter lecturing there. Cincinnati was then a town of but seven thousand people; but Dr. Drake thought that if Kentucky and Lexington could sustain a university, Ohio and Cincinnati should support at least a department of one. In December, 1818, he obtained a charter for the medical college from the legislature, with himself and Drs. Brown and Coleman Rogers as corpor- ators. In November of the second year thereafter, the year after that in which Cincinnati became a city, the school opened with twenty-five students. Dr. Drake, president by the charter, delivered an inaugural address, which was published with a memorial to the legislature

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HISTORY OF CINCINNATI, OHIO.

asking the endowment of the college by the State. He appeared personally with this, which was signed only by himself, before the house of representatives the next winter, and secured a grant of ten thousand dollars for the erection of a hospital in Cincinnati, in which the college professors "were to be ex officio the medical at- tendants, and in turn to have the privilege of introducing the pupils of the college." The sum was paid in depre- ciated bank paper; but was sufficient for a beginning, and by it was laid the foundation of the old Commercial hospital, the predecessor of the present magnificent Cin- cinnati hospital, in which the provision for medical pro- fessors and students remains substantially as in the origi- nal act of 1821.

In November, 1821, the college opened its second course of lectures with thirty students-an increase of twenty-five per cent. At the end of this term the con- nection with it of Dr. Drake, its founder and president, temporarily ceased. He had unwittingly prepared the way for his own dismissal in a provision of the charter making the faculty also the regents of the institution; and so, when the majority was against him, he had no recourse but to retire. Internal dissensions arose among the professors; and the closing scene is thus graphically described in Dr. Drake's own words :

At eight o'clock we met, according to a previous adjournment, and transacted some financial business. A profound 'silence ensued ; our dim taper shed a faint light over the faces of the plotters ; and every thing seemed ominous of an approaching revolution. On trying oc- casions Dr. - is said to be subject to a disease not unlike St. Vitus' dance ; andon this he did not wholly escape. Wan and trembling he raised himself (with the exception of his eyes), and in lugubrious ac- cents said : "Mr. President, in the resolution I am about to offer, I am influenced by no private feelings, but solely by a reference to the public good." He then read as follows : "Voted, that Daniel Drake, M. D., be dismissed from the Medical College of Ohio." The por- tentous stillness recurred, and was not interrupted until I reminded the gentlemen of their designs. Mr. - -, who is blessed with stronger nerves, then rose, and adjusting himself to a firmer balance, put on a proper sanctimony, and ejaculated : "I second the motion.' The crisis had now manifestly come ; and learning that the gentlemen were ready to meet it, I put the question, which carried, in the classical language of Dr. - -, "Nemo contradicente." I could not do more than tender them a vote of thanks, nor less than withdraw ; and per- forming both, the Doctor politely lit me down stairs.

Dr. Drake was thus legally, but unjustifiably, ousted from the institution which was mainly his creation, and which was still the darling of his ideals. He waited a few months, publishing a pamphlet or two in his defense, until it became certain that he could not be reinstated, and then accepted another invitation to the chair of Materia Medica in the Transylvania University. His introductory lecture, upon resuming the chair, was upon the Neccessity and Value of Professional Industry. He remained with this school about four years, and then re- turned to the practice of his profession, and in 1827 also began the publication of The Western Medical and Physical Journal, of which he was in charge for many years. The same year he established an Eye Infirmary in Cincinnati, partly as a charitable institution, which met with much success, but did not become permanent. In 1830, after declining a Professorship of Medicine in the University of Virginia, he accepted a place in the Faculty of Jefferson Medical College, at Philadelphia-

only, however, that he might enjoy superior opportuni- ties for the selection of professors for a new institution which he meditated forming in Cincinnati. It was or- ganized the following year, as a Department of Miami University ; but, before it opened as such, a consolida- tion was effected with the older institution, the Medical College of Ohio, in virtue of which Dr. Drake again be- came connected with it. He remained only a year, however, sustaining meanwhile the duties of two profes- sorships, one of them that of Clinical Medicine, the es- tablishment of which he had suggested as a means of permanently uniting the schools, and volunteered to take its added burdens upon himself. The hospital wards at that time afforded limited facilities for such a professor- ship in practical operation; and Dr. Drake, seeing that his new chair could not be sustained, preferred to with- draw from the institution. He published, about this time, a volume of Practical Essays on Medical Education and the Medical Profession in the United States, dedicating it to his class. The little book has been highly praised by the profession.

Dr. Drake was a many-sided man; and, besides his books on medicine, he was the author of the quite re- markable volumes, for the time, entitled Notices Con- cerning Cincinnati, published 1810, and also of the Pic- ture of Cincinnati, in 1815. He delivered an important address, which was published, before the Kentucky Literary Convention, November 8, 1833, On the Im- portance of Promoting Literary and Social Concert in the Valley of the Mississippi, as a Means of Elevating its Character and Perpetuating the Union. He was also active, in 1820, in securing the establishment of the Western Museum, in the College building on Walnut street, and fifteen years afterwards in promoting the con- struction of a railroad from Cincinnati to Charleston, South Carolina-a project which at last culminated, sub- stantially, in the building of the Southern Railroad.

Still another medical school was founded through the exertions of Dr. Drake, in June, 1835, as a branch or de- partment of the Cincinnati college, then altogether qui- escent for a number of years, as regards literary or scien- tific instruction. He had taken a lively interest in and assisted in the beginnings of the college, in 1818-20; and now, wholly on a private foundation, without endow- ment, he undertook to extend its usefulness by establish- ing a medical department within it. Drs. Drake, S. D. Gross, Landon C. Rives, and Joseph N. McDowell, were its projectors; and they derived little or nothing in the pecuniary way from it during the four years it lasted, the expenses of the school swallowing up almost the entire revenue from their lectures. The celebrated Dr. Willard Parker was professor of surgery in it for a time, and when he withdrew, in the summer of 1839, to take a chair in the College of Physicians and Surgcons of the city of New York, it struck a fatal blow to the institution. One after another the remaining professors felt constrained to withdraw, and presently Dr. Drake stood alone, when the school ceased to exist. He was then elected to a place among the faculty of the Louisville Medical insti- tute, afterwards the University of Louisville, and held it

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for ten years. The trustees of the institute having passed a regulation in effect dismissing a professor when he had reached the age of sixty-five years, Dr. Drake, albeit he was still three years short of that limit, thought proper to withdraw, although the trustees willingly abrogated the rule in his favor. It was now 1849, and he was at once invited to a chair in his original institution, the Ohio Medical College, where he lectured during a single ses- sion, and then yielded to urgent requests from his former associates at Louisville that he would return there. For two sessions he served the Medical Institute again; but finally, in hope yet of doing something to build up his first professional school, he came back to the Medical College of Ohio, and there did his last work. He was almost sixty-seven years old when, November 5, 1852, just at the re-opening of the college for the session, death by congestion of the lungs arrested and closed his long, varied, and honorable career. Two years before this he had completed his truly great Treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America-an invaluable work, which brought him small financial bene- fit, in comparison with the immense labor he bestowed upon it. There have since been many eminent men in the annals of medicine in Cincinnati; but Daniel Drake is still the clarum et venerabile nomen in the past of the profession here. Professor Whitaker, of the Medical college, in his Historical lecture introductory to the pre- liminary course, on the fourth of September, 1879, says of him :

Dr. Drake's moral character was without a stain. He was uncom- promising in the maintenance of what he believed to be right. Will- fully, he injured no man; but he was of so ardent a temperament, his ambition was so great, and his opposition to what he thought wrong so determined, that he doubtless was often to blame for the many strifes and misunderstandings that made him hosts of bitter enemies and drove him from positions of honor which were his due. His friends were as devoted as his enemies were bitter. He was the recipient of many tokens of honor from scientific bodies at home and abroad. He was an earnest advocate of temperance, and gave to it his great eloquence and energy.

He died in Cincinnati November 5, 1852, æt. sixty-seven. His grave is at Spring Grove. His monument is this college. It stands like Sir Christopher Wren's. Of this great architect it was said: "Si queris monumentum, circumspice"-"If you seek his monunient, look around you."

DOCTOR STITES.

In 1802 came Dr. John Stites, jr., from Philadelphia, and with him so much of a new departure in medical science as had been made by Dr. Benjamin Rush, of that city, then called the Sydenham of America and exercising a powerful influence upon the profession in this country. Stites had a number of the writings of Dr. Rush and his pupils, and was himself a youth of twenty-two, fresh from a partial course of medical training in the Quaker City, and full of the ideas that had begun to prevail there. He formed a partnership with Dr. Goforth, the preceptor of Drake, who thus had easy access to the new books, de- voured them with avidity, and imbibed the new doctrines, which Goforth, as we have seen, indignantly scouted. Dr. Stites remained here less than a year, and then went to Kentucky, where he died five years after his removal to the west, at the early age of twenty-seven. He was a native of New York State.

DR. JOHN BLACKBURN

was the next medical immigrant to Cincinnati, coming in 1805, from Pennsylvania, where he was born, in Lancas- ter county, in 1778. He had no advantage over most other early Cincinnati physicians as a graduate from a medical school; but had respectable acquirements in va- rious departments of learning. Two years after he came, when the regiment was raised in Hamilton county to repel an expected Indian attack under the Prophet, Dr. Black- burn accompanied it as surgeon during its short service. He staid here only until 1809, and then removed to a farm in Kentucky, opposite Lawrenceburgh, whence he remov- ed into Indiana, and there died in 1837.

DR. SAMUEL RAMSAY

was a native of York county, Pennsylvania, and had at- tended medical lectures, but was without a diploma of graduation. He came to Cincinnati in 1808 and formed a partnership with Dr. Allison, which was maintained un- til the death of the latter in 1815. Dr. Drake says that "Dr. Ramsay, though not brilliant, had a sound medical judgment, united with regular industry, perseverance, and acceptable manners. Thus he retained the practice into which his connection with Dr. Allison had introduced him, and continued in respectable business up to the pe- riod of his death in the year 1831, when he was fifty years of age."

A MORTALITY LIST.

Dr. Drake notes the interesting fact that, of the seven- teen physicians who practiced in Cincinnati during the first thirty years of its existence, but two died here, and none of them, here or elsewhere, of pulmonary consump- tion; while in the succeeding thirty years, or a little more, about fifty died in the city, many of them at a compara- tively early age, and a number from consumption. The earlier physicians, except Dr. Drake, left no memorials of their practice nor any record of their observations here, probably in consequence of their defective general and professional education.

THE EARLY PRACTICE.

Near the close of his elaborate discourse, Dr. Drake brings.in an interesting sketch of the practice of the early day, which we gladly transfer to these pages:

In the times of which I speak the extinct village of Columbia, and the recently awakened and growing town of Newport, with the sur- rounding country on both sides of the river, were destituteof physicians and depended on Cincinnati. A trip to Columbia consumed half a day, and when Newport asked for aid, the physician was ferried over the river in a canoe or skiff, to clamber up a steep icy or deep mud bank, where those of the present day ascend, from a steamboat, in their carriages on a paved road. Every physician was then a country prac- titioner, and often rode twelve or fifteen miles on bridle-paths to some isolated cabin. Occasional rides of twenty and even thirty miles were performed on horseback, on roads which no kind of carriage could travel over. I recollect that my preceptor started early, in a freezing night, to visit a patient eleven miles in the country. The road was rough, the night dark, and the horse brought for him not, as he thought, gentle; whereupon he dismounted after he got out of the vil- lage, and, putting the bridle into the hands of the messenger, reached his patient before day on foot. The ordinary charge was twenty-five cents a mile, one half being deducted and the other paid in provender for his horse or produce for his family. These pioneers, moreover, were their own bleeders and cuppers, and practiced dentistry not less, certainly, than physic-charged a quarter of a dollar for extracting a single tooth, with an understood deduction if two or more were drawn

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at the same time. In plugging teeth tin-foil was used instead of gold- leaf, and had the advantage of not showing so conspicuously. Still further, for the first twelve or fifteen years every physician was his own apothecary, and ordered little importations of cheap and inferior medi- cines by the drygoods merchants once a year, taking care to move in the matter long before they were needed. From four to five months were required for the importation of a medicine which, at this time, being ordered by telegraph and sent by express, may be received in two days, or a sixtieth part of the time. Thus science has lengthened seconds into minutes. The prices at which these medicines were sold differed widely from those of the present day. Thus an emetic, a Dover's powder, a dose of Glauber's salt, or a night-draught of paregoric and antimonial wine-haustus anodynus, as it was learned- ly called-was put at twenty-five cents, a vermifuge or blister at fifty, and an ounce of Peruvian bark at seventy-five for pale and a dollar for best red or yellow.

On the other hand, personal services were valued very low. For bleeding, twenty-five cents; for sitting up all night, a dollar; and for a visit, from twenty-five to fifty cents, according to the circumstances or character of the patient.

Many articles in common use then have in half a century been super- seded or fallen more or less into neglect. I can recollect balsam of sul- phur, balsam of Peru, balsam tolu, Glauber's salt, flowers of benzoin, Huxham's tincture, spermaceti (for internal use), melampodium, flowers of zinc, ammoniaret of copper, dragon's blood, elemi, gamboge, bitter apple, nux vomica, and red, pale, and yellow bark. On the other hand, we have gained since that day the various salts of quinine and morphine, strychnine, creosote, iodine and its preparations, hydrocyanic acid, er- got, collodion, sulphate of magnesia, and chloroform. Indeed, in half a century our materia medica has undergone a decided change, partly by the discovery of new articles and partly by the extraction of the ac- tive principle of the old. The physician often carried medicines in his pocket, and dealt them out in the sick-room ; but the common practice was to return home, compound and send them out.

Probably the most remarkable case ever treated, simply but efficaciously, by the profession in Cincinnati, was a case of witchcraft. Dr. Drake thus humorously relates it :

Witches were not then extinct, and some of them were actually known. One of the most mischievous lived a few miles back in the country, and bewitched a woman on the river bank. Her husband came at dusk in the evening for assistance, and went into the lot to assist in catching my horse, which of course we failed to do, and he ascribed the failure to the witch having entered the animal. It only remained to give him a paper of medicine, which he afterwards assured me was the best he had ever tried, for, as he entered the door of his cabin the witch es- caped through the small back window and fled up the steep hill to the woods. He carefully preserved the medicine as a charm, and found it more efficacious than a horse-shoe nailed over the door, which, before the united skill of Dr. Goforth and myself had been brought to bear on this matter, was the most reliable counter-charm.

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History of Cincinnati, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 80

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co. Number of Pages: 666

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co.
Number of Pages: 666