crude soil quite as well, if not better, than on the culture-beds of civilization.
Genius is an elementary force of nature, and is instinctively at war with the
controlling and refining hand of convention and tradition.
    In the medical history of the West one colossal figure looms up in the very
 foreground. It is of such gigantic proportions that all else appears accidental
 and merely like a part of the stage-setting. Even when viewed through the
 aisles of time at a distance of many decades it appears as large and distinct
 as it did when it first emerged in the center of the stage of events. It is the
 figure of him who was the Father of Western Medicine, one of the greatest
 physicians America has produced, a patriot of the truest blue, a nobleman by
 nature, a scholar by ceaseless toil, the peer of any of the Eastern pioneers in
 medicine, the bearer of one of the most distinguished names in the intellectual
 history of our country-DANIEL DRAKE.
     A recent writer, in an accurate and very readable sketch of this wonderful
man, very aptly likens him to another example of Western genius, Abraham
Lincoln. Like the great Chief Executive, Drake began life as the son of an
uncultured, hard-working settler who could not give his son even ordinary
advantages of training and education. Yet, both these poor farmer boys rose
from their humble surroundings to positions of distinction and honor and
became great in different spheres of activity. Daniel Drake was born on a
farm near the present town of Plainfield, Essex County, New Jersey, October
20, 1785. When he was two and a-half years old, his parents joined a party
of New Jersey farmers who were seeking new homes in the Western country.
This was about the time when the first settlers were invading the vast and
unknown territory West of the Alleghenies and were building the first log-
cabins at what is now Marietta, Ohio. It was fully two years before a solitary
block house had arisen on the site of Cincinnati. Daniel Drake's father, Isaac
Drake, with his wife and children, located in the wilds of Kentucky, twelve
miles southwest of the present town of Maysville, and about seventy-five miles
from Lexington. The name of the new settlement was Mayslick. Here it
was where Daniel Drake grew up in the bosom of nature, the child of simple
and pure-minded countryfolk.
   The year of Drake's birth will ever remain memorable in the annals of
American medicine. It was the birthyear of three other Americans who
became leaders in their respective departments of medical science. William
Beaumont, the great physiologist, whose name is inseparably connected with
the case of Alexis St. Martin, was born in 1785 in Lebanon, Conn. He was
the first American who seriously concerned himself about physiological prob-
lems, and has not inappropriately been called the Father of American Physi-
ology. Another great American that first saw the light of day in 1785 was
Benjamin Winslow Dudley, whose achievements in genito-urinary surgery
under priontive conditions of practice, have hardly been surpassed, even in
ofr advanced day. His marvelous record as a lithotomist will always remain
a source nf pride to the profession of this country. He was a Virginian by
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