FILSON CLUB PUBLICATIONS No. 20
THE HISTORY
OF
The Medical Department
OF
Transylvania University
BY
DOCTOR ROBERT PETER
Prepared for Publication by his Daughter, Miss Johanna Peter
Member of The Filson Club
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
JOHN P. MORTON & COMPANY
Printers to The Filson Club
1905
COPYRIGHTED BY
The Filson Club
and All Rights Reserved
1905
PREFACE
In preparing for publication the following sketch ofthe famous Transylvania Medical Department andits professors, I have placed in foot-notes, as far aspracticable, my own additions to the text, so as to avoidmaking any radical change in my father's manuscript.
Portions of the history may seem fragmentary; someof the lives of the professors may be incomplete; some,no doubt, are insufficiently noticed, but this is easilyunderstood when it is considered that my father wrotethis narrative at irregular intervals of leisure in the yearsfrom 1873 to 1878, when some of the professors werestill living; and that the writing was left by him in ayet uncompleted state and lacking those finishing toucheswhich no other hand could so well give. In what I havedone I have striven for accuracy. My father's reminiscenceswill have due weight as coming from one mostintimately associated with Transylvania and her medicalteachers—from the one colleague of all the brilliant companywho could best transcribe them. The notice ofDoctor Eberle I have copied from the TransylvaniaJournal of Medicine of 1838, as the nearest I could get[Pg iv]to the estimation in which he was held in the TransylvaniaSchool. The sketch of Doctor Bruce is gatheredmainly from obituaries by his colleagues. That of DoctorChipley—oftenest described, by those who knew him, asnature's nobleman—was written by his daughter, Mrs.Boykin Jones, in answer to my letter to her. I haveadded a few words about Doctor Marshall, and DoctorSkillman, "the beloved physician," the last survivor ofthe Transylvania Medical Faculty. And I have givenas best I could a description of the last declining yearsof Transylvania, with some account of the Medical Halland its ultimate fate. Any biography of Doctor Peter,I fear, must be unsatisfactory unless written at length.The brief summary of his life introductory to The Historyof Transylvania University, published by The Filson Clubin 1896, was called "insufficient," "far too modest," etc.Such the story of a life so long, so full, and so many-sidedmust ever be unless a volume be devoted to it.In what I now say of my father I feel, even more than Idid then, that I can not do justice. It is a mere itineraryof a life-journey. The same thing is true in varying deg