Page:A History of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania.djvu/170

 Medicine in the University. A part of the course of 1815-16 had devolved upon him. His first efforts to teach the Practice of Medicine were decidedly successful; to this, testimony is given by Dr. Coxe, in a letter to Dr. Norcum, of North Carolina, dated May 29, 1818, wherein he says, referring to Dr. Chapman: “His lectures now for three successive courses have been well received, and have each year been improved by his more immediate interest in their perfection.” With respect to the performance of the duties of this Chair as it reflected upon his position in the profession, we must agree with the language of one of his biographers, “that he filled it for more than the third of a century with distinguished success, and left it with a national reputation.”

At the time of his accession to the Professorship, Dr. Chapman had not attained his thirty-seventh year, and had not been settled in Philadelphia as a practitioner more than twelve years. In allusion to the transfer to the “highest position of honor and trust then known to the medical profession,” Dr. Jackson remarks: “In undertaking the duties of this Chair, difficulties were to be encountered that do not beset it in ordinary circumstances. His abilities as a teacher, his knowledge and acquirements as a sound and practical physician, were now to be severely tested.”

“The first duty devolving on Dr. Chapman on assuming his new Chair was to settle the plan of his course. A large body of our physicians had been educated in the doctrines of Rush, and they were popular. The old fabric of methodic medicine had been razed to the ground by the assaults of Brown and Rush, while the views and doctrines they had attempted to establish Dr. Chapman had been compelled to abandon as unreal, from the results of his own experience and researches. Medicine, at that time, was at a halt. All the facts that could be known, by the then available means of research and investigation, were exhausted. Nothing new could be expected from them, and all the attempts to work them into a consistent theory had proved miserable abortions.”

“Dr. Chapman had no pretensions to be a reformer, that he