Daniel Drake Research Articles

Professors of racial medicine: imperialism and race in nineteenth-century United States medical schools.

This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.

In Memoriam Tribute to Jeffrey Robbins, PhD (1950-2022).

In Memoriam Tribute to Jeffrey Robbins, PhD (1950-2022).

A Scientific Revolution: Ten Men and Women Who Reinvented American Medicine

A Scientific Revolution: Ten Men and Women Who Reinvented American Medicine

Leaving a Legacy: Lessons from the Writings of Daniel Drake by Philip M. Diller

Leaving a Legacy: Lessons from the Writings of Daniel Drake by Philip M. Diller

Early history of transylvania medical college: The saga of a disputed autopsy precipitating a duel and grave robbing.

At the beginning of the 19th century, there were only five medical schools in America. The Medical Department of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, was the first in the West; however, it had few students or faculty until it was restructured in 1815. In 1817-1818, three of its faculty members (Benjamin Dudley, Daniel Drake, and William Richardson) quickly developed a highly dysfunctional relationship. Dudley tried to have Richardson fired, with Drake blocking this. Drake then criticized Dudley's performance of a coroner's autopsy, resulting in both parties publishing derogatory comments about each other. Dudley then challenged Drake to a pistol duel but Drake, not believing in dueling, declined. Richardson, wanting to defend his friend's honor, accepted the challenge and was mortally wounded in August 1818. Dudley, a prominent surgeon, saved his life. Both Dudley and Richardson were important Kentuckian Freemasons and the brotherhood felt compelled to punish them for un-Masonic behavior. Drake left and started his own medical school in Cincinnati in 1819, in direct completion with and destabilizing Transylvania's school. This saga is dissected in the context of the bizarre history of dueling as part of the Code of Honor by which gentlemen in the Old South often resolved their differences. The essay analyzes the autopsy dispute and reviews politics within the medical school, the University, and newer competing medical schools. Transylvania's medical school was recognized as one of the best in the US during the first half of the 1800s, but by 1859, it had permanently closed its doors. Clin. Anat. 32:489-500, 2019. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

American Plagues: Lessons from Our Battles with Disease by Stephen H. Gehlbach

Reviewed by: American Plagues: Lessons from Our Battles with Disease by Stephen H. Gehlbach Alan M. Kraut Stephen H. Gehlbach. American Plagues: Lessons from Our Battles with Disease. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. ix + 301 pp. Ill. $38.00 (978-1-4422-565-07). Before he was dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dean Emeritus Stephen H. Gehlbach was a medical detective. He served in the Epidemic Intelligence Service with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta. In the years following his service, he has sought to "make epidemiology contagious" (p. viii). His intended audience is composed of the medical and public health students "who need to understand how diseases operate in populations and how best to control them" (p. viii). The updated version of his 2005 volume, American Plagues: Lessons from Our Battles with Disease, succeeds admirably. It conveys Gehlbach's infectious enthusiasm for his subject so effectively that general readers will also relish the historical detective's account of medical mysteries stretching back to the founding of the nation. Founding Father Benjamin Rush was also an early medical detective. Gehlbach begins his volume with Rush's response to the deadly 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, which took four thousand lives, almost 10 percent of the city's population. Attributing the disease to miasmas, Rush was mistaken in his understanding of the epidemic's cause. His bleeding of yellow fever victims failed to cure them. However, without a sneer of condescension, Gehlbach describes Rush's mistakes and why other physicians came to different conclusions. Not long before Rush, a clergyman effectively curbed a smallpox epidemic, and not by prayer alone. Cotton Mather's advocacy of inoculation, echoed by Zabdiel Boylston in Boston and Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, led to a comparison of outcomes with interventions, a kind of "natural experiment," to answer questions about the efficacy of preventive procedures. Later, Benjamin Waterhouse would conduct America's "first public health experiment" to learn whether cowpox could prevent smallpox as Englishman Edward Jenner claimed. Jenner and Waterhouse are no strangers to students of public health history, but Gehlbach explains how their achievements contributed to the expanding field of disease prevention and control. The relationship of environment to disease vectors was explored by Daniel Drake in the 1840s to understand what caused autumnal fever. Offering the example of malaria and the mosquito, Gehlbach explains how comprehending environmental factors such as those that favor mosquito breeding could assist physicians hoping to prevent malaria transmission. In his discussion of Lemuel Shattuck, a pioneer in the collection and analysis of vital statistics, Gehlbach reminds readers that it is impossible to determine the health patterns of any population without systematic data collection. He describes how physicians and statisticians in Massachusetts jointly lobbied for state legislation in the 1840s that improved the "recording of vital events, such as births, deaths, marriages, and standardize the system of morality classification" (p. 84). The 1850 Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts compiled under Shattuck's leadership became a public health classic. [End Page 666] Gehlbach's chapters on tuberculosis, polio, cancer, heart disease, and HIV/ AIDS amply demonstrate how advances in medical science resulted in public health programs to curb the spread of some diseases and to prevent others. In his chapter on polio, Gehlbach traces the hundred-year life cycle of the epidemic from its first identification in the 1890s, to the Salk and Sabin vaccines that stopped the catastrophic summer epidemics in the United States, to the current patterns of prevention that have all but extinguished the disease as a world public health threat. Gehlbach's updated edition includes chapters on fresh patterns of infectious disease and their spread, sometimes by the very health care providers and in hospitals dedicated to battling such diseases, a circumstance first identified 170 years ago by Dr. Oliver Wendell Homes. The bacterium called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), for example, is often contracted in hospitals where there has been a breakdown of sterile procedures. The volume's last chapter, "Another Kind of Plague," refers to the plague of misunderstanding and misinformation that Gehlbach associates with the antivaccine movement, especially...

The Magnitude of the Problem

“On Monday morning last, about a quarter past two, St. Louis and the surrounding country, was visited by one of the most violent shocks of earthquake that has been recorded since the discovery of our country.” (Louisiana Gazette, 21 December 1811 ) This is where the story begins, in the wee hours of the morning on 16 December 1811. Many early Americans, in particular in the sparsely populated midcontinent, were awakened that night by seismic waves from the powerful mainshock and kept awake by a robust aftershock sequence. Of those who experienced the shaking, only a small percentage documented their experiences in written accounts that have been handed down to us. The collection of known archival accounts numbers only in the hundreds. Some of the accounts appeared to defy credulity: waterfalls appearing on the Mississippi River, the course of the river itself temporarily reversed, riverbanks and even entire islands collapsing. Other accounts reveal remarkable insight, even prescience; for example, medical doctor Daniel Drake, who observed that shaking was stronger in the Ohio River Valley than in the adjacent uplands and went on to ascribe the difference to the fact that strata in the river valley are “loose.” Samuel Mitchill, a representative in the U.S. Congress with training in geology, set out to collect accounts in the hope that they would lead him to “something like a tolerable theory of earthquakes.” Along the way he came to appreciate the challenge of the task he set himself. “The phenomena,” he wrote in 1815, “were described in the most fearful and alarming strains by several writers. Much exaggeration was interwoven with some of the narratives. Some, indeed, were tinctured with fable and burlesque.” (Many of the accounts that likely impressed Mitchill as fable and burlesque have in fact found support in modern science: …

It’s probably in the Air: Medical Meteorology in Denmark, 1810–1875

It’s probably in the Air: Medical Meteorology in Denmark, 1810–1875

History of the department of surgery in Cincinnati

This narrative reviews the foundations and development of surgery in Cincinnati beginning with the surgical pioneers and the founding of the first medical institutions by Dr. Daniel Drake. The amalgamation of multiple medical schools resulted in university affiliation and a “full-time” chairman of surgery. The arrival of Dr. George Heuer and his Johns Hopkins group caused great turmoil but resulted in a strong department of surgery and residency program. Drs. Reid, Carter, and Altemeier succeeded Dr. Heuer and each contributed to the department’s growth and success. Dr. Josef E. Fischer became chairman of surgery in 1978 and led the department through difficult times to its greatest expansion and development—bringing to a department with an outstanding history and tradition the reforms and modernizations needed to take it into the 21st century. Dr. Fischer has now returned to Boston and Harvard and was succeeded by Dr. Jeffrey Matthews in 2001. Under his capable leadership the department of surgery at the University of Cincinnati seems assured of a bright future.

A Condensed History of Ophthalmology in Cincinnati (1827–1999)

The history of ophthalmology in Cincinnati dates back to 1827, when Dr. Daniel Drake founded the Eye Institute of Cincinnati. Since that time, many other individuals have influenced the course of ophthalmology in the city and region. Included among these were Elkanah Williams, first chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at Miami Medical College of Ohio (the forerunner of the University of Cincinnati), William Seeley, Robert Sattler, Christian Holmes, Derrick T. Vail and his illustrious son Derrick T. Vail, Jr., Clarence King, Karl Ascher, Donald Lyle, and Mary Knight Asbury. The author presents brief biographical summaries and interesting anecdotes about each of these individuals and several others of importance to Cincinnati ophthalmology.

Daniel Drake's medical geography

Daniel Drake's two volume study, Principal Diseases of the Interior of North America (1850–1854), is examined in the context of the medical geographical and geographical medical literature of the period. His work covers an in-depth examination of the geography of the interior of the continent as it relates to disease occurrence. Drake's contribution appears to have occurred independently of the then contemporary European literature. Certainly in its method of research no one up to that point had developed an approach of examining, in such detail, the relationships between geography and disease over so vast an area. Drake is another example of a physician who turned to a geographical approach to better understand disease. The question arises as to what stimulated Drake into taking this approach, and what were the opinions of his study by North American and European critics? Although in the historical development of medical geography it is a major contribution, to date no medical geographer appears to have written an in depth analysis of his work.

Daniel Drake MD (1785-1852): pioneer teacher, author, medical and social entrepreneur of the USA.

Daniel Drake MD (1785-1852): pioneer teacher, author, medical and social entrepreneur of the USA.

Daniel Drake and Medical Education

For William Osler,1Daniel Drake was a unique figure in American medicine and the founder of nearly everything that is old and good in Cincinnati. Certainly he is one of the most fascinating individuals in medical history. Of particular interest is his abiding concern with education and the legacy of schools and hospitals he left behind him. In addition to founding the institutions that later became the University of Cincinnati and the Cincinnati General Hospital, he organized scientific and medical societies, a natural history museum, libraries, a botanical garden, academies, and schools of all sorts, including those for professional teachers and for the education of the blind and the deaf and dumb. Daniel Drake (1785-1852) was not only the leading pioneer physician west of the Alleghenies but also an indefatiguable man of letters, a naturalist, philosopher, teacher, and humanist. The first man in Cincinnati to receive an MD, he

Drake, the Many-Sided Physician

sylvis nunciuswas the motto chosen by Daniel Drake in 1828 for theWestern Journal of Medical and Physical Sciences. Translatable as Messenger From the Backwoods, it accurately describes the man himself. He made known to the world that Cincinnati was emerging from a frontier settlement into an important focus of agricultural, mercantile, and cultural development. Fully as important as the message was the messenger, a citizen as well as a great physician. In 1800 Cincinnati was a frontier village of 750 people depending for survival on Fort Washington and its garrison. The Treaty of Greenville, by which the Indians had agreed to withdraw beyond a line a little west of Cincinnati, was only five years old. The economic devastation following the American Revolution had sent people west to start a new life. Of these a few were restless adventurers who craved a continuation of the stirring events of only

Daniel Drake and medical education

Daniel Drake and medical education

Who was Daniel Drake?

Who was Daniel Drake?

Daniel Drake and the crisis in American medicine of the 19th century

Daniel Drake and the crisis in American medicine of the 19th century

Daniel Drake and the Crisis in American Medicine of the 19th Century

From the perspective of the 20th century, American medicine during all of Daniel Drake's lifetime was in a state of crisis. 1 Despite its ancient and honorable past and the best efforts of generations of theoreticians and practitioners, medicine lacked both a body of theory that adequately explained health or illness and a set of procedures adequate for the treatment of illness or the maintenance of health. It was thus no science, but it was also no profession, for it lacked a set of commonly held assumptions concerning the proper practice of the craft and its proper role in society, and an agreement upon the knowledge that was necessary to practitioners and that thus might form the curriculum of medical education. This did not stop the physicians and surgeons of 150 or 200 years ago from practicing medicine, of course, or from writing systematic treatises on disease, its nature, its

The Medical Milieu of Daniel Drake

Of the various ailments that physicians had to treat in the early 19th century, fever and inflammation were especially important. Today both of these conditions have quite precise meanings but to understand the medical environment of Daniel Drake (1785-1852) we must ignore the present and enter into the meanings prevalent during his lifetime. Both inflammation and fever had been clearly recognized in antiquity, although their nature was a matter of conjecture and speculation. Hippocrates had admirably described examples of febrile diseases, with such accuracy that in many instances we can make a clinical diagnosis today from his descriptions. And the cardinal signs of inflammation—the tumor, rubor, calor, and dolor that medical students still religiously memorize—were already enunciated by Celsus in the first century AD. Physicians could easily identify inflammation on the surface of the body and infer its presence in the internal organs. Yet the alleged causes, phrased in the

Paulding's The Dutchman's Fireside and Early American Romance

PAULDING'S THE DUTCHMAN'S FIRESIDE AND EARLY AMERICAN ROMANCE Robert P. Winston* In his essay "James K. Paulding and the Foundation of American Realism," Louis D. Owens suggests that in the important essay "National Literature" as well as elsewhere Paulding argues for the kind of realism William Dean Howells hoped to develop at the end of the nineteenth century.1 Certainly Paulding's "National Literature" calls for America to write its own fiction. He attacks those authors who "have overlooked our own rich resources, and sponged upon the exhausted treasury of our empoverished neighbours,"2 and he condemns those who argue that America has no materials for "romantic fiction."3 Although Paulding admits that America is without the "fairies, giants, and goblins" which are the stuff of "mere romance-writers," he notes that the history of the founding of America is "amply sufficient for all the purposes of those higher works of imagination, which may be called Rational Fictions":4 The best and most perfect works of imagination appear to me to be those which are founded upon a combination of such characters as every generation of men exhibits, and such events as have often taken place in the world, and will again. Such works are only fictions, because the tissue of events which they record never perhaps happened in precisely the same train, and to the same number of persons, as are exhibited and associated in the relation. Real life is fraught with adventures, to which the wildest fictions scarcely afford a parallel; and it has this special advantage over its rival, that these events, however extraordinary, can always be traced to motives, actions, and passions, arising out of circumstances no way unnatural, and partaking of no impossible or supernatural agency." Paulding's comments here speak unarguably for a fiction that adheres more closely to life than that of "mere romance-writers." At the same time, however, his description of the uses to be made of life is strikingly like those of professed romancers who saw their art as, essentially, shaping history to make its meaning readily understandable to the reader. As John Caldwell Stubbs has written, "the nineteenth-century romancer's professed goal was to order the random happenings of experience into artful patterns so that the reader could comprehend the experience—either intellectually or emotionally."6 Such a writer •Robert P. Winston is an Assistant Professor of English at Dickinson College. He has written on Crevecoeur and Robert Montgomery Bird and is currently engaged in a study of Paulding. 48Robert P. Winston "should consider his 'neutral ground' bounded by historical facts. But within this boundary he may imaginatively picture his conception of human experience."7 Paulding's high praise of Charles Brockden Brown's fiction in "National Literature" makes it clear that he does not oppose romance as a form;8 rather, he opposes extreme or absurd forms of the romance and wishes fiction to be more closely "bounded by historical facts." Despite Paulding's seeming movement toward realism in his criticism, his novel The Dutchman's Fireside clearly utilizes elements of the romance. In fact, in his use of history and the frontier, as well as in the manner in which he develops characters and organizes elements of the plot, Paulding's practice is certainly that of the early American romancer.9 In writing Fireside Paulding was inspired by an account of the period, Mrs. Grant's Memoirs of an American Lady, published in England in 1808 and in America a year later.10 An understanding of Paulding's use of the Memoirs, however, is dependent upon an understanding of his attitude toward history. On January 1, 1835, Paulding wrote a letter to Dr. Daniel Drake in which he discussed history and fiction: "I do not think authentic History a proper basis for a novel. Tradition, or that species of History which belongs to the fabulous ages, or at least to a very remote period of obscurity, I should think much better. It would allow for alterations, additions, and embellishments, without violating the sanctity of truth for what nobody believes, and suffer no injury by being combined with fiction."11 Thus, while Fireside is a...