On Page 22 of Doctor Yandell's _Memoir of Doctor Cooke_, we are informed that "his practice on himself was of the same heroic character that he pursued with his patients. He bled himself at once copiously and repeated the operation again and again as symptoms appeared to him to demand it, at the same time keeping up purgation with calomel. Exposed as he was on his farm, these attacks became frequent and his constitution, naturally enfeebled by increasing years, at length gave way under them." Again, on Page 27 of the same _Memoir_, Doctor Yandell says: "The perfect sincerity with which he held his opinions was evinced by his carrying out his practice in his own case. On one occasion this was near costing him his life. He was seized with intermittent fever, on his farm near Louisville in the fall of 1844, and for several days took his pills--composed of calomel, rhubarb, and aloes--in the confident belief that they would arrest the disease; but the chills continued to recur with an increasing tendency to congestion until at last his case became alarming. His old friend, General Mercer, of Virginia, who happened to be on a visit to him at the time, called on me and gave me an account of his situation, asking me to visit him. Doctor Cooke was reluctant to take quinine, but finally consented and was relieved, and afterward, I believe, used the remedy in his practice." A characteristic anecdote is recorded of him in _Collins' History of Kentucky_. "One Sunday morning, waiting on some of his family to get ready for church--the Methodist church, of which he and they were members--he picked up a discourse by the Reverend Doctor Chapman, then Episcopal clergyman of Lexington. The argument for the Old Church of England attracted his attention. He perused and studied it fully, sent for all the available authorities on the subject; studied them with such effect that at once he changed his communion to the Episcopal Church and was ever after a rigid and zealous pillar to that church, and an industrious student of the writings of the theological fathers." His logic, on which he based his medical theory and practice, is most elaborately set forth in his only large work, already mentioned--_A Treatise of Pathology and Therapeutics_--and was tersely summed up by a most zealous believer and pupil of his[52] as follows: "If all diseases result from congestion of the _vena cava_, and if calomel is the best and most reliable remedy, what is the use of applying to any other means?" Because of its simplicity and its apparently logical basis, the system of Doctor Cooke was very attractive to students of medicine. If true--and they could not doubt it--it was a great new discovery of a royal road to medical practice which avoided all the drudgery over pathology, chemistry, the materia medica and therapeutics of the old school. All ordinary diseases were a unit produced by a common cause, and calomel was the principal panacea!