DOCTOR BENJAMIN W. DUDLEY.
From a Portrait by Jouett owned by Mrs. Robert Peter.
Professor Dudley continued to lecture until 1850, when he resigned and was appointed Professor Emeritus. Doctor James M. Bush succeeded him in the chair of Anatomy, and Dudley's nephew, Ethelbert L. Dudley, took that of Surgery, which he filled with great success.
A schedule of the succession of the Professors of this Medical School will best illustrate the changes which occurred since 1819. (See Schedule A.)
Professor B. W. Dudley remained in the regular performance of the duties of his double chair—Anatomy and Surgery[15]—with the able assistance of Doctor J. M. Bush, until 1844, when Doctor Bush was regularly appointed Professor of Anatomy. Doctor Dudley, as above mentioned, retained the chair of Surgery until 1850. In that year the Medical Faculty intermitted the winter session in Lexington, with the consent of the Trustees, in order to establish the "Kentucky School of Medicine" in Louisville as a winter school, retaining the Transylvania Medical College as a summer school. Doctor Dudley's last course of lectures was delivered in the session of 1849–50.
Simultaneously with the resignation of his professorship, he withdrew from his extensive practice and retired to his beautiful suburban residence, "Fairlawn," in the vicinity of Lexington.[16] His death occurred in Lexington on the twentieth of January, 1870, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.
Doctor Dudley was an earnest and laborious practical man. His whole time and energies were devoted to his profession, in which, like the celebrated John Hunter—the one of his early preceptors Dudley most admired—he sought instruction in the book of nature—in his practice—rather than in the written archives of science.
As a teacher and lecturer he was admirably clear and impressive. While no attempt at eloquence was ever made by him, and no early training or later readings in the classics gave ornament to his style, his terse and impressive sentences, as they were delivered apparently without the slightest effort or premeditation as also without hesitation or interruption, were the embodiment of the ideas to be conveyed, in the most lucid and concise language. It seemed impossible to use fewer or more appropriate words to convey to the least appreciative student the subject to be taught.
This, with his great practical skill as a surgeon, his minute and ready knowledge, his great experience, his unequaled success in his numerous operations, his suavity and dignity of manner, the magnanimity and liberality of his character, and his eminent devotedness to his profession, made his students most earnest admirers and followers and aided greatly in the establishment and maintenance of our Medical College.
Although possessed of the firmest nerves, so that his hand never faltered in the severest operation,[17] his sensibility was so keen that he sometimes suffered from nervous prostration after the strain was over. Many of his pupils no doubt recollect with what feeling—manifested even by tears—he recited the sufferings and dangers of a patient of his who was the subject of obstinate secondary hemorrhage.
It was as a practical surgeon that Doctor Dudley justly attained a world-wide reputation, and especially as a successful operator in lithotomy. This operation he performed two hundred and twenty-five times, without losing a single patient until after his one hundredth operation, losing in the whole of his operations only about two per cent. So celebrated had he become for this operation as early as 1827 that the Kentucky Gazette for April 11, of that year, records that he operated three times for stone in one day.