As a political writer he ably discussed the most weighty problems of the times, he being editor of the Louisville Focus. Want of concentration of his wonderful mind prevented him from becoming eminent in medicine as in other pursuits which divided his mental powers.[14]
No systematic medical instruction seems to have resulted from this imperfect organization of the Medical School in 1809, although occasional lectures may have been delivered and private instruction given.
Doctor Dudley, after having graduated in medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, visited Europe in 1810, spending four years in Paris and London in the arduous pursuit of medical and surgical information and experience under the celebrated teachers of that day. Returning then to Lexington he began a career as a practical surgeon and teacher, in which his name became distinguished throughout the civilized world.
Doctor Benjamin Winslow Dudley
Was born in Spottsylvania County, Virginia, April 12, 1785. His father, a leading Baptist minister in Kentucky, Ambrose Dudley, had commanded a company in the Revolutionary War, and removed to the neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky, when his son Benjamin was little more than a year old, and to that city in 1797. Here, reared with such tuition as the schools of the day and the country afforded, Benjamin was placed while yet very young under the medical tutelage of Doctor Frederick Ridgely, then an eminent physician in large practice in Lexington, under whose instruction his ardent taste for medical knowledge was largely gratified. In the autumn of 1804 he went to the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and was there fellow-student with Daniel Drake, John Esten Cooke, and William H. Richardson, his subsequent colleagues in the Medical Department of Transylvania University.
Returning to Lexington at the close of the medical lectures at Philadelphia, he engaged in the practice of physic and surgery with Doctor Fishback during the spring and summer months of 1805. He returned to the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine from that institution March, 1806, just two weeks before he was twenty-one years of age.
Desirous of perfecting his medical education in Europe, after a few years' further practice in Lexington he descended the Ohio River on a flatboat to New Orleans in 1810, just one year before the first experimental steamboat was launched upon those waters. At New Orleans he purchased a cargo of flour and sailed on a prosperous voyage to Gibraltar, and after advantageously disposing of his cargo at that place and at Lisbon, he made his way through Spain to Paris. After four years spent in Europe zealously and industriously employing all the great facilities of the hospitals, dissecting-rooms, and eminent instructors of Paris and London, and after traveling six months in Italy and Switzerland, he finally returned to Lexington in the summer of 1814, conscious of innate powers and ardently devoted to his profession.
