Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/311

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Dartmouth Medical School in 1878, re- taining his chair there for twenty-four years, delivering his lectures during the summer. For over thirty-five years he was on the staff of the Good Samaritan Hospital of Cincinnati, and from 1874 to 1895 on that of the Cincinnati Hos- pital, after which he was made emeritus professor, and served as one of its trus- tees for many years. He was a member of the city, county, state and national medical societies, and had served as president of the American Surgical Association, of the American Academy of Medicine, of the Ohio State Medical Society. He was one of the associate editors of Keen and White's "American Text-book of Surgery." To Ashhurst's "International Encyclopedia of Surgery" he contributed monographs on " Gunshot Wounds" and "Injuries and Diseases of Muscles, Tendons and Fasciae;" to Pep- per's "System of Practical Medicine" one on "Tetanus;" to Dennis's "System of Surgery" one on "Gunshot Wounds," and in the " Clinic," the official organ of the Medical College of Ohio, and other medical journals appeared some thirty good articles on operative surgery.

D. W.

Daniel Drake and His Followers, Dr. Otto

Juettner.

The Lancet Clinic, Cinn., Apr. 10, 1909.

Cooke, John Esten (1783-1853).

He was born on the second of March, 1783, while his parents were on a visit in Boston. His father, Stephen Cooke, was a physician of Virginia and a surgeon during the Revolutionary War.

He began to study medicine under his father and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1805. After gradua- tion he settled in Warrenton, Fauquier County, Virginia, but in 1821 moved to Winchester. Just before leaving here he was engaged with Dr. McGuirc in organizing a medical school. In 1827 he was called to the chair of theory and practice of medicine in Transylvania as successor to Daniel Drake. Largely, if not entirely, in view of Dr. Cooke's

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ideas, which Drake strongly opposed, Cooke first attracted public notice through an article on autumnal fever published in the "Medical Recorder," 1824. He was the first professor of the Transylvania University to prepare a systematic work on any branch of medicine. His "Treatise of Pathology and Therapeutics" forms two octavo volumes of about 540 pages each, but the third volume of this work never appeared. His essays in the "Transyl- vania Journal" and the " Medical Record- er," would make another volume.

In 1827 he became associated with Dr. Charles Wilkins Short as co-editor of " Transylvania Journal of Medicine and the Associate Sciences," a journal issued by the medical faculty of Tran- sylvania University. As editor, he with Charles Caldweh was the most potent factor in shaping medical thought in his time and throughout the southwest.

In 1837 he was elected to the chair of theory and practical medicine in the Louisville Medical Institute, which be- became the University of Louisville. The best description of him as a man is given by Lunsford P. Yandell. Stern and sometimes even harsh in his inter- course with the world, Dr. Cooke was gentle, tender, and child-like in his religi- ous affections, in the domestic circle, and in social intercourse with the friends he loved.

Dr. Cooke's manner as a lecturer was not pleasing. His utterance, if not painful, was hesitating and difficult. But it was not many weeks before most of his pupils were so charmed with the simplicity and compendiousness of his th ories that homely elocution was for- gotten.

The theory which made him celebrated he elaborated during his long and soli- tary rides in Virginia. It consisted of a universal origin of disease, viz., cold or malaria. These weakened the action of the heart and produced an accumula- tion of blood in the vena cava and largo veins. The congestion principally af- fected the liver. Largely because of this