Leonidas M. Lawson, M. D.,
Who filled the chair of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical Department of Transylvania University from 1843 to 1846, inclusive, was born in Nicholas County, Kentucky, September 10, 1812. He had received his medical degree from this same department of Transylvania in 1837.
He was engaged in Cincinnati in private practice, giving clinical instruction in the hospital and editing his recently established medical periodical, The Western Lancet—of which he was sole originator and proprietor—when he was called to the newly established chair of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology in the Transylvania Medical Department, in which he had graduated.
Here he taught with great success until called to the chair of Materia Medica and General Pathology in the Ohio Medical College at Cincinnati in 1847. During the vacation months of 1845, he spent seven months in a visit to Europe, and especially in clinical studies in Guy's Hospital, London, with great advantage to himself.
Doctor Lawson continued to teach from this chair until the death of Professor J. P. Harrison, whom he succeeded in that of the Principles and Practice of Medicine and Clinical Medicine, in the same college in 1852. He was appointed Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Kentucky School of Medicine in Louisville in 1854, but accepted a call to the same chair in the Medical College of Ohio, Cincinnati, in 1857. He filled the chair of Clinical Medicine in the University of Louisiana, New Orleans, in 1860, but returned in consequence of the Civil War to the Medical College of Ohio the following year, in which college he remained until his death, January 21, 1864.
He founded the Western Lancet, and was its sole editor and proprietor from 1842 up to the time of his decease. He also edited Hope's Morbid Anatomy, 1844, and published a treatise on the Practical Treatment of Phthisis Pulmonalis in 1861.
Doctor Lawson was a lover of his profession and a most indefatigable worker and student. Remarkably lucid and impressive in his oral teachings, and methodical in his laborious professional and editorial occupations, he was a modest but self-possessed, undemonstrative gentleman of high probity and personal merit. The world at large did not fully appreciate his value, or that of his labors.
His daughter, Miss Louisa Lawson, studied sculpture as a profession, and as an artist is well known.