Biographies: American National Biography Online (ANB Online) [long message]
The following example from the new _American National Dictionary
Online_ is forwarded to HISTNEUR-L from H-SCI-MED-TECH. Richard Jensen
posted it to that list from ANDB's "Biography of the Day" mailing
list; see <http://www.anb.org> for details. I am forwarding it in its
entirety to alert you to the features of entries in the online edition
and because the ANB's copyright statement permits transmission of
verbatim, unedited copies as long as that statement accompanies them.
Take a good long look at the ANB Online website, starting with "About
ANB" <http://www.anb.org/aboutanb.html> . Then look at one of the
online entries and read the accompanying help screens (especially
"What's new" and "Help") linked from the upper right corner.
I started with the Daniel Drake example, below, by going to its cited
URL/address at <http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-00229.html> . I
then discovered that the ANB Online "search" and "advanced search"
utilities were not available to me, however; presumably, one must
subscribe through an individual or institutional account to use these.
There is a way to circumvent this lockout. Notice that the immediately
previous and subsequent entries in the ANB are linked at the top of an
article! I stepped back through several entries until I encountered
Clara Lajonchere and Stan Finger's biography of Henry Herbert Donaldson
<http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-00220.html> . From there I could
use the Cross-References to jump to ANB entries for other people
mentioned in the biography.
Upon jumping to another entry--Bruce Fye's biography of Henry Newell
Martin, for example--these previous/subsequent links are replaced by a
"Return to" link to take you back to the article (in this case,
Donaldson) which cited the one you are viewing. If you want to start
your alphabetized browsing from the new article (Martin), look at the
contents of the "Location" (Netscape) or "Address" (Internet Explorer)
bar of your browser. The Donaldson-cited Martin address is:
<http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-00577.html?from=../12/12-00220.html&from_nm=Donaldson%2C%20Henry%20Herbert>
If I erase everything _after_ the ".html" and hit my "Enter" key, I am
sent to the presentation format for the article
<http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-00577.html>
which displays its associated links to previous and subsequent
alphabetical entries.
Engaging some brute force and clever skipping-around (or getting your
institution to subscribe), you can locate the entries you want. I
quickly found Duane Haines's entry on Elizabeth Caroline Crosby
<http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-02083.html>, which links to his
piece on C. Judson Herrick (both Herricks, actually:
<http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-02310.html>), which links ...
Russell Johnson
--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 20:48:45 -0500
From: "Harry M. Marks, H-SCI-MED-TECH" <smtedit@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
Subject: FYI: ANB - Bio of the Day: Daniel Drake
Sender: "H-NET List on the History of Science, Medicine, and
Technology" <H-SCI-MED-TECH@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Richard Jensen <rjensen@uic.edu> writes:
American National Biography Online
Drake, Daniel (20 Oct. 1785-5 Nov. 1852), physician, naturalist,
and educator, was born near Bound Brook, New Jersey, the son
of Isaac Drake and Elizabeth Shotwell, farmers. The family moved
west in 1788 to Mays Lick, Kentucky. At the age of fifteen Drake
was apprenticed to Dr. William Goforth of nearby Cincinnati for
training in medicine and surgery, then attended medical lectures
in Philadelphia during the winter of 1805-1806. Drake returned
to Mays Lick but went to Cincinnati in 1807 to take over Goforth's
practice and to marry Harriet Sisson. Five children were born
to the couple, although only two survived childhood, and Harriet
herself died in 1825 when their youngest was only six.
Drake's first scientific publication was "Some Account of the
Epidemic Diseases Which Prevail at Mays-Lick, in Kentucky" (Philadelphia
Medical and Physical Journal 3, pt. 1 [1808]: 85-90). It consisted
of observations in the form of facts from which conclusions might
be drawn: "In most cases [of fever], quotidian intermissions,
or remissions, were observable." "There was, I think, more east-wind
than usual." More polished pieces followed, including two substantial
volumes, Notices Concerning Cincinnati (1810-1811) and Natural
and Statistical View; or, Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami
Country (1815). All retained the character of the first work,
as collections of data--on botany, on the geology and climate
of the Ohio Valley, and on the natural, civil, and medical history
of Cincinnati.
Drake was also practicing medicine during these years and laying
the basis for what would become an extensive consulting practice
(by mail) with patients and other physicians; buying, leasing,
and managing Cincinnati real estate, in partnership with his
wife's uncle Jared Mansfield, surveyor general of the Northwest
Territory and then of the United States; with his brother Benjamin
Drake and then also with their father, merchandising drugs and
medicines, patent medicines, groceries, paints, dyes, surgical
instruments, stationery, books, and "artificial [i.e., artificially
carbonated] mineral waters." In 1813 he was elected a trustee
of the Cincinnati City Corporation. In 1818 he was appointed
a director of the Cincinnati branch of the Bank of the United
States. In 1818 Drake also was made a corresponding member of
the nation's two most prestigious learned societies, the American
Philosophical Society (Philadelphia) and the American Antiquarian
Society (Worcester, Mass.).
As early as 1812 Drake began preparing to make Cincinnati a
center for medical education by creating the institutions necessary
for "literary culture" to flourish--learned societies, libraries,
museums, schools--and in 1815-1816 returned to Philadelphia to
obtain an M.D., thus qualifying for the professorate. His appointment
to the medical faculty at Transylvania University in Lexington
in 1817-1818, announced by the Transylvania trustees shortly
after his return to the West, may indeed have been intended to
prevent Drake from establishing a competing medical college in
Ohio. By May 1818, however, Drake was advertising the availability
of medical lectures in Cincinnati and petitioning the Ohio legislature
for charters of incorporation for a Cincinnati College, a Medical
College of Ohio (both granted in 1819), and a Commercial Hospital
and Lunatic Asylum (granted in 1821) for clinical instruction.
The motifs in these activities are multiple, as are our readings
of them. Drake's publications contributed to scientific knowledge
of the West but also sought to establish Cincinnati's habitability--its
climate and geology supported democracy as well as agriculture,
he said--and especially to assert its competitive advantage vis-a-vis
its regional rivals, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis, slaveocrat
cities where the spirit of enterprise could not be expected to
flourish. The institutions Drake founded in Cincinnati were those
normally founded in order to bring the advantages of "civilization"
to the new cities of the American West, but when Drake wrote
about them, as in An Anniversary Discourse, on the State and
Prospects of the Western Museum Society (1820), he implied that
their establishment would make Cincinnati into the Philadelphia
of the West, perhaps even--because Cincinnati was a new chance
for a new civilization--the Philadelphia of America. For science's
sake he sought to encourage the cultivation of natural history
as an amateur pursuit among Cincinnati's elite but thereby created
a local constituency for higher education and a potential market
for scientific courses taught at his medical school.
At least until the mid-nineteenth century, colleges and medical
schools, like learned societies and museums, were local institutions,
serving the needs of their constituencies rather than their own
(institutional) need for permanence, or the needs of "science"
for continuity in the collection, dissemination, and preservation
of knowledge. Thus they closed their doors because of lack of
funds or lack of interest and reopened--reappeared--when some
new group obtained control of the charter and began doing new
business under the old name, or the old trustees ended their
squabbles and agreed to try again. The continuous life of colleges
and medical schools in particular was rarely longer than a couple
of years. So it was that Drake's professorial career took him
from city to city and from institution to institution. He kept
teaching; the colleges came and went.
Drake taught again at Transylvania from 1823 until 1827. Then
he became coowner and coeditor of the Western Medical and Physical
Journal and, from 1828 until 1838, editor and sole proprietor
of its successor, the Western Journal of the Medical and Physical
Sciences. Commonly called "Drake's" journal as the contemporary
American Journal of Science and the Arts was "Silliman's," and
with a national circulation, it made Drake into the public representative
of science (and medicine as science) in the West, and the West's
representative in the halls of science. It also provided him
with an alternative classroom in which to teach the profession
about its obligations and a way to encourage the collection of
data in botany and natural history, geology, and meteorology.
He was also a regular contributor to the newspapers, opposing
medical quackery; advocating temperance, antislavery, the preservation
of the union, and the candidacy of his friend Henry Clay for
the presidency; and debating the character and extent of municipal
responsibility for public health, especially in response to the
cholera epidemic.
During the 1830s Drake tried to revitalize medical education
in Cincinnati, through a medical department of Miami University,
a reorganized Medical College of Ohio, and finally through a
medical department of the Cincinnati College. In 1839 he accepted
an appointment at the Louisville Medical Institute and in 1840
agreed to serve also as senior editor of its publication, the
Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery.
In 1822 Drake began preparing a comprehensive "Treatise on the
Diseases of the Western Country." This became a life's work,
and it was finally published in 1850 and 1854, in two parts comprising
1,863 pages, as A Systematic Treatise, Historical, Etiological,
and Practical, on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley
of North America, As They Appear in the Caucasian, African, Indian,
and Esquimaux Varieties of Its Population. Like the contemporary
"miscellany" (of which Henry David Thoreau's Walden is the best
known), it was the great repository of all he knew and saw--and
also what he taught, for he routinely used his lectures to develop
text for publication, and drafts of chapters as the basis for
his teaching. Today it is almost unreadable, but the American
Journal of Medical Sciences (July 1850) called it "the most valuable
and important original production . . . that has yet appeared
from the pen of any of our physicians."
In 1849 Drake sent the first volume of the Systematic Treatise
to the printer and resigned from all duties in Louisville, presumably
to devote full time to finishing the project. Nonetheless, he
accepted appointments at the Medical College of Ohio for 1849-1850,
at the Louisville Medical Institute, 1850-1852, then at a revived
Medical College of Ohio until his death in Cincinnati midway
through the term, teaching, as usual, the subjects on which he
was then writing, especially the causes of disease. In the end,
the Systematic Treatise could not be completed, and his editors
cobbled together a second volume out of Drake's 3,000-page manuscript.
Neither the diligent collection of data nor its orderly presentation
could explain what caused what. Drake's generation continually
looked for additional facts, seeking the missing specimen for
the set instead of the missing link in the sequence.
Drake was one of the last physician-naturalists for whom facts
were things that might be collected and stored for future use,
and whose descriptions of nature were intended to elucidate the
meaning of America as new world and as environment. By the time
of his death, the autonomy of facts had begun to be questioned.
By then also, America was no longer new, and its meaning had
been transformed into a series of specialists' questions on the
impact of environment on the evolution and distribution of species
and of human institutions. The result for Drake has been a minor
reputation as civic booster and pioneer this or that, while the
scientific work that brought him national prominence, and his
activities as a medical educator, have come to be seen as merely
the precursors of modern medicine, modern science, and modern education.
Bibliography
Because Drake published almost everything he wrote, few manuscripts
survive, but materials are at the Cincinnati Historical Society
and the Medical Heritage Center Library of the University of
Cincinnati and at the Ohio Historical Society (relating to real
estate investments, in the Jared Mansfield Papers). Student notes
on his classroom lectures are in the Transylvania College Library
and the National Library of Medicine, which also has Drake's
own student notes from his first visit to Philadelphia. Henry
D. Shapiro, "Daniel Drake's 'Sensorium Commune' and the Organization
of the Second American Enlightenment," Cincinnati Historical
Society Bulletin 27 (1969): 43-52, and "Daniel Drake and the
Crisis in American Medicine of the 19th Century," Journal of
the American Medical Association 254 (1985): 2113-16, locate
Drake in the intellectual context of his time, as do the introductory
essays and headnotes in Shapiro and Zane L. Miller, eds., Physician
to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science and
Society (1970), which also contains a complete bibliography of
Drake's writings. Biographies are Emmet Field Horine, Daniel
Drake (1785-1852): Pioneer Physician of the Midwest (1961), which
also contains traces of Drake's voluminous correspondence as
a consulting physician; Otto Juettner, Daniel Drake and His Followers:
Historical and Biographical Sketches (1909), even more laudatory
but rich in information about the careers of Drake's physician
contemporaries; and Edward D. Mansfield, Memoirs of the Life
and Services of Daniel Drake, M.D., Physician, Professor, and Author (1855).
Henry D. Shapiro
Back to the top
Citation:
Henry D. Shapiro. "Drake, Daniel";
http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-00229.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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