Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1375

JOHN ESTEN COOKE (1783-1853) Essays on the autumnal and winter epidemics. Transylvania Press 1829 140 pp. 20.7 cm.

Cooke graduated in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1805 and began practice in Virginia. He was in the process of helping organize a medical school at Winchester in 1827 when he accepted the chair of the theory and practice of medicine at Transylvania University as successor to Daniel Drake (see No. 1406 ff.), his classmate at Pennsylvania. In 1837 he was elected to the chair of theory and practice of medicine at the University of Louisville and taught there until his retirement in 1844. Cooke was the first professor at Transylvania to write a major medical treatise, publishing A treatise on pathology and therapeutics at Lexington in 1828. He also served as a coeditor of the Transylvania journal of medicine and made many contributions to the medical literature of his day. Like many practitioners of his day, Cooke was a proponent of the heroic school of medicine in which purging and bleeding were the chief therapeutics. His favorite remedy was calomel and he used it copiously in his practice. Cooke presented many of his views in this work on autumnal and winter epidemics and it created some controversy for him among his medical colleagues. The treatise was first published in the Transylvania journal of medicine as a series of four essays and was then reissued as a book for the convenience of the medical students.

See Related Record(s): 1406 1376 1377