DANIEL DRAKE.

1785-1852.

IN preparing a memoir of this distinguished physician, for many years my colleague and intimate friend, I shall avail myself largely of my "Discourse on his Life, Character, and Services," delivered, by request, before the Medical Faculty, Trustees, and students of the University of Louisville, in January, 1853, within a few months after his lamented death. The facts therein stated are founded almost exclusively upon my own knowledge and observation, and I have reason to believe that the portrait which I drew of him was so accurate and life-like, as to meet with the entire approval of his family. Edward D. Mansfield, Esq., in his "Memoir of the Life and Services of Dr. Drake," published at Cincinnati in 1855, refers to the Discourse as "able and faithful," and he has not hesitated to make free use of it, for testimony illustrative of the professional character of our common friend.

Daniel Drake was born at Plainfield, in Essex County, New Jersey, October 20th, 1785. Here he spent the first two years and a half of his life. At the expiration of this time, his father emigrated to Kentucky, then only nine years older than his son, and took up his residence at Mayslick, a new settlement, consisting of a small colony of New Jersey people, with a few stragglers from Virginia and Maryland, whose occupation was clearing the forest and cultivating the soil.

The log cabin of that day, the residence of the Drake family, constituted an interesting feature of the landscape. As the name implies, it was built of logs, generally unhewn,

with a puncheon floor below, and a clapboard floor above, a small square window without glass, a chimney of "cats and clay," and a coarse roof. It consisted generally of one apartment, which served as a sitting-room, dormitory, and kitchen. The ancestors of Dr. Drake, although poor and illiterate, possessed the great merit of industry, temperance, and piety. Both his grandfathers lived in the very midst of the battle scenes of the Revolution; one of them, Shotwell, was a member of the Society of Friends, and was, of course, a non-combatant, while the other, who had no such scruples, was frequently engaged in the partisan warfare of his native State. The father of Dr. Drake died at Cincinnati in 1832; the mother in 1831; both at an advanced age.

The first fifteen years of young Drake were spent at Mayslick, in the performance of such labors as the exigencies of his family demanded. In the winter months, generally from November until March, he was sent to school, distant about two miles from his father's cabin, while during the remainder of the year he worked upon the farm, attending to the cattle, tilling the soil, and clearing the forest, an occupation in which he always took great delight.

This kind of life, rude as it was, and uncongenial as it must, in the main, have been to his taste, was not without its advantages. It eminently fitted him for the observation of nature, so necessary to a physician. Nothing escaped his eye. Nature was spread out before him in all her diversified forms, and he loved to contemplate her in the majestic forest, in the mighty stream, now placid and now foaming with anger, in the green fields, in the flowers which adorn the valley and the hill, in the clouds, in the lightning and thunder, in the snow and the frost, in the tempest and the hurricane.

It had another effect. While it had the disadvantage of preventing him from pursuing a steady course of literary culture, and fitting him for the early practice of medicine, it excited in him habits of industry and attention to business, teaching him patience and self-reliance, and giving him an

insight into many matters, to which the city trained youth is a stranger.

Finally, the physical labor which he underwent there served to impart health and vigor to his constitution, and thereby contributed to produce that power of endurance which he possessed in a degree superior to that of almost any other man I have ever known.

But the settlement of Mayslick was not without its charms and enjoyments. To the young and imaginative mind of Drake, every little spot in the landscape was invested with peculiar beauty and interest. What to an ordinary observer was barren and unattractive, was to him a source of neverfailing gratification. In the spring and summer, the surface of the earth was carpeted with the richest verdure, and embellished with myriads of wild flowers, which, while they rendered the air redolent with fragrance, delighted the eye by their innumerable variety. The trees, those mighty denizens of the forest, were clothed in their most majestic garb, adding beauty and grandeur to the scene, enlivened by the music of birds, which thronged the woods, and constituted, along with the merry and frolicsome squirrel, the familiar companions of the early settler.

The scholastic advantages of young Drake, during his residence here were, as already hinted, very limited. The teachers of the place were itinerants, of the most ordinary description, whose function it was to teach spelling, reading, writing, and ciphering, as far as the rule of three, beyond which few of them were able to go. The fashion in those days was for the whole school to learn and say their lessons aloud; a practice commended by Dr. Drake in after life, as a good exercise of the voice, and as a means of improving the lungs, and disciplining the mind for study in the midst of noise and confusion.

His first teacher was a man from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an ample exponent of the state of society in that then benighted region. The school-house in which he was educated was fifteen by twenty feet in its dimensions, and one

story high, with a wooden chimney, a puncheon floor, and a door with a latch and string. In the winter, light was admitted through oiled paper, by long openings between the logs. Glass was not to be obtained. The ordinary fee for tuition was fifteen shillings a quarter.

As to the classics, he knew nothing of them until after he began the study of medicine; for the reason, first, that there were no teachers in his neighborhood competent to impart instruction in them, and secondly, that he was too poor to go from home. His father stipulated with his professional preceptor that he should be sent to school for six months to learn Latin; but by some great absurdity, as he observes, this was not done until he had studied for eighteen months that which, for the want of Latin, he could not comprehend. He never, I believe, studied Greek. In after-life he acquired some knowledge of French.

During his sojourn under his father's roof, he was a close observer of the people around him, residents as well as emigrants, the latter of whom were in the habit of passing in great numbers through the settlement. He studied their manners and habits, observed their prejudices, noticed and compared their opinions, and thus acquired important knowledge of human nature. Books and book-learning alone do not serve to make up a man's education; he must mingle with the world, and endeavor to derive from its intercourse those lessons of wisdom and practical tact which are to regulate his conduct and beautify his life.

Thus, it will be seen that his alma mater was the forest; his teacher, nature; his classmates, birds, and squirrels, and wild flowers. Until the commencement of his sixteenth year, when he left home to study medicine, he had never been beyond the confines of the settlement at Mayslick, and it was not until his twentieth year, when he went to Philadelphia to attend lectures, that he saw a large city. The "Queen of the West," as Cincinnati has since been styled, was then a mere hamlet, with hardly a few thousand inhabitants. Kentucky, at that early day, had but one University, and, although

it was hardly fifty miles off, his father was too poor to send him thither.

Young Drake was early destined for the medical profession; and in the autumn of 1800, at the close of his fifteenth year, he was sent to Cincinnati, to Dr. Goforth, as a private pupil. The arrangement was that he should live in his preceptor's family, and that he should remain with him four years, at the end of which he was to be transmuted into a doctor. It was also agreed, between the parties, that he should be sent to school two quarters, that he might learn the Latin language, which, up to that time, he had, as already stated, wholly neglected. For his services and board, the preceptor was to receive four hundred dollars, a tolerably large sum, considering the limited means of his father.

During his pupilage, he performed, with alacrity and fidelity, all the various duties which, at that early period of the West, usually devolved on medical students. His business was not only to study his preceptor's books, but to compound his prescriptions, to attend to the shop or office, and, as he advanced in knowledge, to assist in practice. The first task assigned him was to read Quincy's Dispensatory and grind quicksilver into mercurial ointment; the latter of which, as he quaintly remarks, he found, from previous practice on a Kentucky hand-mill, much the easier of the two.

Subsequently, and by degrees, he studied Cheselden on the Bones and Innes on the Muscles, Boerhaave and Van Swieten's Commentaries, Chaptal's Chemistry, Cullen's Materia Medica, and Haller's Physiology. These works constituted, at that time, the text-books of medical students, and the custom of many was to commit to memory the greater portion of their contents.

At the close of his studies, he formed a partnership with his preceptor; and, in the autumn of 1805, attended his first course of lectures in the University of Pennsylvania, under Rush, Wistar, Barton, Physick, and Woodhouse. Returning to the West at the termination of the session, he practised medicine