The annals of the earlier efforts to establish medical education and a medical college in connection with Transylvania University—the first in the whole West and the second in the United States—are meager and unsatisfactory.
As already stated, the first Medical Professors in this University—Doctors Samuel Brown and Frederick Ridgely (1799)—no doubt taught and lectured occasionally to such students as were present. The files of the old Kentucky Gazette show that Doctor James Fishback, who was unanimously appointed to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in Transylvania in 1805, advertised to lecture, and did probably lecture on these subjects. But he resigned in 1806. Doctor James Overton, who had been appointed to the chair of Materia Medica and Botany in 1809, said in his letter of acceptance (on the occasion of his reappointment in the reorganization of the Medical Faculty in 1817) that he "had engaged for some time in giving lectures on Theory and Practice in this town," etc.
According to the best recollection of the late Doctor Coleman Rogers—for a long time before his death a resident in Louisville—the Medical College of Transylvania University was reorganized in 1815 by the appointment of the following Faculty:
Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery.
Doctor Coleman Rogers, adjunct to this chair.
Doctor James Overton, Theory and Practice.
Doctor William H. Richardson, Obstetrics, etc.
Doctor Thomas Cooper (Judge Cooper), of Pennsylvania, to the chair of Chemistry, Mineralogy, etc.
Doctor James Blythe, then acting President of the University, was to give chemical instruction. Doctor Cooper and Doctor Rogers did not accept this appointment. According to Doctor Rogers' recollection a regular course of lectures was not delivered by this Faculty, although Doctors Dudley and Overton probably both lectured or taught "as they previously had done."[21]
Doctor Dudley's own recollection, as detailed to the present writer, was also that he and Doctor Overton, as well as Doctor Blythe, lectured in 1815–16 to about twenty students, of whom the late Doctor Ayres and the yet surviving Nestor of Transylvania graduates, Doctor Christopher C. Graham, of Louisville—now almost a centenarian[22]—were in attendance as pupils. Very little can now be ascertained, from existing records, of the character of Professor James Overton, M. D. Doctor Christopher C. Graham, in a recent letter to the writer, gives some of his reminiscences of him in the following language: "Doctor Overton was a small, black-eyed man, very hypochondrical and sarcastic (notoriously so), and yet quite chatty, humorous, and agreeable; telling his class many funny things.... He was well educated for his day and plumed himself especially on his Greek." Doctor Overton removed from Lexington to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1818.[23]