Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1270

CHARLES CALDWELL (1772-1853) Medical & physical memoirs, containing, among other subjects, a particular enquiry into the origin and nature of the late pestilential epidemics of the United States. Thomas & William Bradford 1801 [16] 296 [4] [305]-348 pp. 20.4 cm.

Caldwell was born in North Carolina a few years after his parents came to the United States from northern Ireland about 1765. An exceptional student, he decided upon a medical career following the death of his parents during his fifteenth year. He started a local preceptorship but in 1792 went to Philadelphia to complete his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania. An egotistical, self-reliant, and assertive individual, Caldwell was frequently involved in controversy during his professional life. It was probably a combination of these character traits that caused him to be disappointed in his Philadelphia medical career. So in 1819 he accepted an offer to move to Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky where he played a prominent role in developing their medical school. In 1837 he was invited to Louisville where he assumed a leading role in establishing their program of medical education, remaining active there until a few years before his death. Caldwell was a prolific writer on medical and scientific topics as well as a wide variety of non-medical subjects. This is one of his earliest contributions. The initial memoir on the climatic and physical characteristics of Philadelphia is intended as background information for the second memoir on the origin and nature of Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic. Portions of the second memoir had appeared earlier in 1799 "in one of the public prints of the city" (Preface, p. [7]). The objective of his third memoir on the winter migration of swallows was to "contribute something to the elucidation of an interesting and long contested point, in the philosophy of natural history" (Preface, p. [8]). The final memoir criticizing portions of an essay on goiter written by Benjamin Smith Barton (see No. 1209) was included "for the purpose of counteracting, as far as in my power, a pathological error, the more likely to become popular and to mislead, because it issues from a respectable source" (Preface p. [9]). Also included in the book is his An address to the Philadelphia Medical Society, on the analogies between yellow fever and true plague which was issued separately in 1801.

See Related Record(s): 1209

Cited references: Austin 392; Cushing C32