Ethelbert Ludlow Dudley, M. D.,
Nephew of the late distinguished surgeon, Benjamin W. Dudley, was his private pupil for many years. He graduated in the Medical Department of Transylvania University with distinguished honor in 1842, after having attended three full courses of instruction in that department. His first course of medical lectures was in the winter of 1838–39. It was the first session in which the present writer occupied the chair of Chemistry and Pharmacy, and well he remembers the assiduous attention of his pupil; his avidity in the acquisition of knowledge and his unusual ability to retain it. Distrusting yet his own attainments and desirous of more thorough training before taking upon himself the responsible and arduous offices of a practitioner, he, under the immediate charge of his uncle, then in active practice, attended two other full courses of medical lectures (sessions 1842–43 and 1843–44) as resident graduate. During this period he sometimes officiated as prosector to his distinguished kinsman.[92]
DOCTOR ETHELBERT L. DUDLEY.
From a Photograph.
Before the next following session, Doctor Ethelbert L. Dudley was appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy in the place of Doctor James M. Bush, who had been promoted to the chair of Anatomy. This responsible office he filled until called to the chair of General and Pathological Anatomy in 1847–48.
From the origin of this medical school Professor Benjamin W. Dudley had taught in the combined chair of Anatomy and Surgery, blending the two in a manner most instructive and practical.[93] In 1837, he accepted Doctor James M. Bush as adjunct to the combined professorship, and in 1844, Doctor Bush having been appointed Professor of Anatomy, the elder Dudley restricted himself to the chair of the Principles of Surgery.
In the summer of 1846, Doctor Ethelbert L. Dudley was appointed to deliver a course of lectures on Comparative Anatomy. This duty he performed to the highest satisfaction of all concerned; and when, almost at the beginning of the next regular session (1847–48), he was called to the chair of Anatomy and Physiology, he successfully encountered the great labor of preparing and delivering a new course of lectures on these subjects. At the same time he also discharged the arduous duties of Demonstrator of Anatomy—duties more onerous in this school, in our small inland city, than in most other medical colleges. No one in the whole school accomplished half the work which he mastered. No task seemed too great for his young and ardent energies.
In 1849, he originated and took upon himself the sole charge as editor of the Transylvania Medical Journal, a new series of the old Transylvania Journal of Medicine. He published three volumes in three successive years, aided only occasionally by some of his colleagues. In the spring of 1850, he visited Europe for professional improvement, making many friends; amongst the distinguished medical men of England particularly. Immediately on his return from Europe, in the autumn of that year, the present writer announced to him, in the city of New York, his appointment to the chair of Descriptive Anatomy and Histology in the Kentucky School of Medicine. This was a new school which some of the physicians of Louisville and professors of the Lexington school were about to establish in the former city, to which place students of medicine from the South and West were beginning to flock, to the neglect somewhat of the time-honored Transylvania school, in which it was proposed to continue medical instruction in summer sessions.
This appointment he accepted, joining in the preliminary October course of lectures and aiding greatly by his talents and energy in building up that institution. Transferred in the following year to the chair of Surgery in the Transylvania summer school, on the retirement of his uncle from active professional life, he continued to teach with distinguished ability in the position made illustrious by his predecessor, until the close of the school shortly before the outbreak of our Civil War.
In the second year of the Kentucky School of Medicine, he was transferred to the chair of Surgical Anatomy and Operative Surgery, and accordingly gave the surgical-clinical instruction in the Marine Hospital of Louisville to the combined classes of the two medical schools of that city during the session of 1851–52. A course which was a decided success for the young professor and surgeon, and which helped to place him at once on the elevated position as a professional man and a gentleman which he maintained to the day of his death and to which few men, of his age especially, ever are fortunate enough to attain.[94]
After another successful session in this school he, with the other Transylvania professors, resigned and returned permanently to Lexington, resuming his practice there and his duties in the renewed winter sessions of the Transylvania Medical Department.
As a practitioner, especially of surgery, Doctor E. L. Dudley always commanded the highest respect and admiration of his colleagues as well as the confidence and affections of his patients. Singularly unselfish and always willing to devote himself fully to his profession, his patients and his friends, few men had the power so quickly and so firmly to bind others to him with the ties of affection.
With nerves as of steel, clear eye, quick judgment and answering hand, combined with the kind feelings of a woman and a fullness of professional knowledge rarely surpassed, his short career as a surgeon—all too brief!—was yet a brilliant one. Had his life been spared to him the name of Dudley had achieved a yet higher distinction in the annals of surgery.
At the outbreak of our Civil War, Doctor Dudley's loyal attachment to the nation and his love of country caused him to take an active part against the rebellion. While the fate of Kentucky hung yet in the balance of a professed neutrality, he was actively instrumental in organizing a battalion of "Home Guards," of which he was at once appointed Commandant—an organization which greatly helped to prevent the precipitation of our State into the war for secession.[95]
Obtaining authority to organize a regiment of volunteers for active service, of which he was Colonel, preferring this active position to the less belligerent one of Medical Director which was proffered him, he left Lexington with his command for the southern part of the State. There, exhausted by the continued labors and exposures of his combined offices of colonel, surgeon and physician to his men (which he would not commit to another), he fell a victim to typhoid fever on February 20, 1862, at the age of forty-four. His remains, brought to Lexington, were received with public honors and were followed to the cemetery by a long procession of sorrowing friends.