Page:A History of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania.djvu/154

 regularly with Dr. Rush, graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1794. The subject of his Thesis was Inflammation. He witnessed the epidemic yellow fever of 1793, while a student of medicine. After graduation, Dr. Coxe again visited Europe, and remained a pupil of the London Hospital for one year; he subsequently studied in Edinburgh and Paris, and returned to Philadelphia in 1796.

In 1797 Dr. Coxe served as one of the resident physicians of Bush Hill Hospital, under the charge of Drs. Physick and Cathrall, when, as Dr. Bell informs us, there were only twenty-three or twenty-four physicians who remained at their posts in this epidemic, and eight of their number died.

Dr. Coxe was appointed, by the Board of Health, Physician of the Port in 1798, the period of another great visitation of yellow fever. He was likewise, for several years, Physician of the Philadelphia Dispensary, and of the Pennsylvania Hospital. He was, at the commencement of the present century, an earnest, enthusiastic advocate of vaccination. After vaccinating his oldest child, then an infant, at the time the full efficacy of the practice was still in suspense in the public mind, he fully tested it by exposing him to the influence of smallpox. The result of this, then bold experiment, contributed in no small degree to establish reliance on the protective power of vaccination.

It has been stated above that Dr. Coxe succeeded Dr. Woodhouse in the Chair of Chemistry in 1809, and that he was transferred to that of Materia Medica and Pharmacy in 1819. He was possessed of considerable classical attainments, and was well versed in the ancient literature of Medicine. The doctrines and opinions of the earlier fathers of Physic had so superior a value in his estimation as to lead to too exclusive an exposition of them in his lectures. This was more particularly the case when occupying the Chair of Materia Medica and Pharmacy; but the merit is due him of opposing the extended assumption of the doctrines of solidism that prevailed, and of giving proper significance to the facts of the humoral physiology and pathology, which were gaining ground from the