There is in our nature something like the love of the relic which makes us revere the memory of Transylvania University. Early in the year 1799 a medical department was attached to this University which was the first medical college in the great Mississippi Valley and the second in the whole United States. The medical department of the University of Pennsylvania antedated it, but it antedated all others afterward established in any part of our vast domain. We can not, like our English cousins, go back along the pathway of centuries to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and revere them for their age; we have nothing in our new country that partakes of such age. We are a young people in a young country, and our Transylvania Medical College was old enough from our standpoint to be crowned with hoary years. We revere it as the first medical college on this side of the Alleghanies. We revere it for the efforts it made to prepare our young physicians to cope with the diseases that afflicted our people. We revere it for the good name it gave our State in the fame it acquired. We revere it for the success of Professor Brown in introducing vaccination in advance of its discoverer, for the brilliant and numerous operations in lithotomy by Professor Dudley, and for the noble efforts of others of its professors in prolonging human life and mitigating its pains. What it did in the day of its glory is set forth in the pages which follow, and he who reads them will hardly doubt that the medical department of Transylvania University is worthy of the record here made for it. R. T. DURRETT, _President of The Filson Club_. ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Doctor Robert Peter _Frontispiece_ Doctor Samuel Brown 8 Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley 16 Doctor James Overton 28 Doctor William H. Richardson 32 Daniel Drake, M. D. 40 Charles Caldwell, M. D. 48 Doctor John Esten Cooke 64 Doctor Charles Wilkins Short 80 Doctor Lunsford P. Yandell, Senior 84 Doctor James M. Bush 116 Doctor Ethelbert L. Dudley 132 Doctor Henry Martyn Skillman 144 Transylvania University--Medical Hall 156 Absolom Driver 162 MEDICAL DEPARTMENT OF TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY The history of medicine and of the earliest medical men in Kentucky clusters around the name of TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY.