Excerpt from Some of the Medical Pioneers of Kentucky
The remarkable achievements of the pioneer medical men of Kentucky read so like a romance, and have been handed down as such an abiding and fruitful source of inspiration to their students and successors that, ever since the writer entered the profession, nearly half a century ago, it has been the constant wish and hope of all of us, expressed by frequent resolutions of the State Society and similar organizations, that to some especially qualified member of the faculty be delegated the important and pleasant duty of writing "The History of Medicine in Kentucky." Dr. David W. Yandell, doubly fitted for the task on account of his recognized ability as a writer, and by the fortuitous circumstance that he and his honored father represented in their own persons direct connecting links between the pioneers and the older members of the present day profession, often half promised to undertake the work, but death called him before it was begun. Then for years, Dr. Lewis S. McMurtry, because of his facile and puissant pen, his familiarity with the literature of the subject, and his knowledge of the personnel of nearly all except the first generation of our forbears, became the unanimous choice of his colleagues for this service, but the exactions of a large surgical practice and his teaching work and other duties made such demands upon his time as to make him unwilling to accept the assignment.
The failure of these efforts, and the knowledge that many of the only too scant case reports and other writings of this period of our medical history, some more or less crude and fragmentary, but often of great value, were published in journals long out of print, some gone hopelessly and many of them difficult to trace or obtain, and that much valuable unwritten information would be forever lost with the passing away of men already of advanced age, induced the writer to undertake, not the preparation of a medical history, but, recognizing that history, after all, is little more than a succession and tactful combination of selected biographies, the far more modest task of collecting and preserving in a somewhat permanent form such still available data of that time as might in abler and more fitting hands, be useful as the foundation of such a history of that day as would be worthy of the actors whose momentous deeds it recorded.
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