Of a well-known family in Maryland,[10] and one of the most celebrated of the early physicians of the West, studied medicine in Delaware, and attended medical lectures in Philadelphia. He was appointed Surgeon to a rifle corps in Virginia when only nineteen years of age, and served in different positions as Surgeon throughout the Revolutionary War. He came to Kentucky in 1790, was Surgeon-General in General Wayne's army in 1794, and after that decisive campaign was ended returned to Kentucky in 1799 and was made Professor of Materia Medica, Midwifery, and the Practice of Physic in the same year in the Medical Department of Transylvania University at the first organization of this department. Widely known as a successful practitioner and a gentleman of great benevolence, disinterestedness, and affability, he was also one of the medical preceptors of Kentucky's distinguished surgeon, Benjamin W. Dudley, and for many years gave active support to Transylvania University as a member of the Board of Trustees. In 1799-1800, he delivered to the small class of medical students then in attendance a course of public instruction which did him much credit--a fact of peculiar interest, "as it proves him to have been," with his able colleague, Doctor Samuel Brown, "_the first who taught medicine by lecture in Western America_." He died at the age of sixty-eight at Dayton, Ohio, December 21, 1824. These first medical professors in Transylvania University were no doubt the first in the promotion of medical education in the West. Medical and Law societies were soon established and were in active operation--as we learn from the columns of the _Kentucky Gazette_, published at the time. How many pupils they attracted and taught we can not now definitely ascertain. In 1801, the meager existing records of the University show a reorganization, in which the Reverend James Moore--who had been replaced in 1799 by a Presbyterian clergyman, the Reverend James Welsh--was restored to the Presidency. "Doctor Frederick Ridgely was made Professor of Medicine, and Doctor Walter Warfield was made Professor of Midwifery, in addition to Doctor Samuel Brown." Doctor Warfield, a physician of Lexington, did not long occupy this chair, and appears not to have lectured in it. In 1804, the Reverend James Blythe, D. D., of the Presbyterian church, who had been President of _Kentucky Academy_, was made acting President of _Transylvania University_, which position he held until 1816. He was subsequently, in 1817, under Doctor Holley's administration, appointed Professor of Chemistry, etc., in the Medical Department. This position he retained until, in 1831, he accepted the Presidency of Hanover College, Indiana.