The life, character, and writings of Doctor Caldwell are no doubt now well known to the medical profession through the numerous biographical notices which have appeared, especially those by the late Professor Lunsford P. Yandell, M. D., in Lindley's _Medical Annals of Tennessee_, and as amplified in the _Transactions_ of the Kentucky State Medical Society in its twenty-first annual session in 1876, and other published sketches. But it may also be studied in his somewhat unfortunate _Autobiography_, which was published in Philadelphia in 1855, two years after his death, edited by the sister of his widow, Miss Harriet W. Warner. It is said of Titian, that when in his old age he took it into his head to _improve_ some of his best pictures by retouching them, his judicious pupils mixed his paints with olive oil so they would not dry and could be easily washed off again, thus restraining him from marring or destroying his finest works and his fame together. Fortunate would it have been for the venerable Doctor Caldwell had much of this senile production--written only seven or eight years before his death--been canceled by a friendly hand. The too harsh criticisms in which he indulged, which placed some of his late colleagues sharply on the defensive and which also gave them powerful weapons of offense, as well as defense, had then been suppressed! On Page 315 of this autobiography he characterized the time-honored maxim, "_De mortuis nil nisi bonum_," as "an ill-founded and dangerous precept." Hence Doctor Yandell, whom he had denounced in this work in the most opprobrious terms, felt justified in his notice of this autobiography in his paper on the _Medical Literature of Kentucky_, published in the _Transactions of the Kentucky State Medical Society_, 1876, Page 62, in the following terms: "It is not only egotistical and vainglorious beyond anything, I believe, to be found in the English language, but it is at the same time defamatory. The author holds himself up to admiration on all occasions and everywhere from boyhood to old age a very hero of romance." And literal quotations from the unfortunate volume give support to these allegations. [Illustration: CHARLES CALDWELL, M. D.] Under the provocation of Doctor Caldwell's posthumous attack, Doctor Yandell defended himself and retorted with the weapons which Doctor Caldwell himself had supplied. But, in later years, not long before his death, Doctor Yandell expressed to the writer, in a friendly letter, something like regret that he had not in this case adhered more closely to that maxim in relation to the dead, above quoted, which Doctor Caldwell had condemned as "ill-founded and dangerous." It must be admitted, however, that the provocation was great.[40]