birth, but spent nearly all of his professional life in Lexington, Ky., as pro-
fessor of surgery in the Medical Department of Transylvania University. He
was fourteen years the junior of his great neighbor, Ephraim MacDowell. of
Danville, Ky., whose name will for all times be linked with an act of scientific
heroism never surpassed in the history of medicine. Still another famous
product of the year 1785 was Valentine Mott, that prince among the early
American surgeons, who, in 1818, ligated the innominate artery, and, as a
result of this bold stroke, rose to one of the highest ranks among the sur-
geons of his time. Thus we see that the year 1785 was particularly fertile
in the production of eminent medical talent in this country. Benjamin Rush,
who had not as yet reached the zenith of his fame, was in 1785, at the age
of 40, teaching chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania. P. S. Physick,
John Hunter's favorite American pupil, generally referred to as the Patriarch
of American Surgery, graduated from the academic department of the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania in 1785. It seems that the whole decade was a
fruitful one for American medicine. John Eberle, one of the founders of
Jefferson Medical College, and afterwards a distinguished teacher of practice
in the Medical College of Ohio, was born two years after Daniel Drake. The
following year (1788) saw the birth of William Gibson, that eminent American
physician who was a marvel of versatility and was conspicuous on this account
among his confreres on both sides of the Atlantic.
   Daniel Drake's people were among the poorest of the poor. When Isaac
Drake and those who depended on him, arrived in the thick forest where he
expected to wrest a home and an existence out of the clenched hands of the
wilderness, his fortune consisted of just one dollar, which was at that time
the price of a bushel of corn. Edward D. Mansfield, who was a cousin of
Daniel Drake's wife and for many years an honored citizen of Cincinnati,
wrote, in 1854, two years after Drake's death, a very readable biography of
Drake. In referring to those primitive days in the Kentucky forests where
young Daniel spent his childhood, Mansfield states that the first residence of
the family was in a "covered pen," built for sheep, on the ground of its owner.
The smallness of his estate may be gathered from the fact, that when a com-
pany of emigrants-five families-purchased a tract of fourteen hundred acres
of land, to be divided among them, according to their respective payments, his
share was only thirty-eight acres, which he subsequently increased to fifty.
There he resided six years, till in the autumn of 1794, he purchased another
farm of two hundred acres, to the neighborhood of which he removed. The
new farm was an unbroken forest which had to be cleared, and the log cabin
built. (Mansfield.)
   Of those early pioneer times in Kentucky, Drake has left a written record
so inimitably beautiful and characteristic that I may be permitted to quote from
it. In his declining years, from 1840 to shortly before his death, Drake, who
was then living in Louisville and teaching at the Louisville Medical Institute,
loved to dwell on the memories of the distant past, and in his reminiscential
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