Doctor Charles Caldwell.
The association of this distinguished professor with the fortunes of the Medical Department of Transylvania, which extended from 1819 to 1837, marked the era of its most rapid development, and embraced a large portion of the time of its greatest prosperity.
The life, character, and writings of Doctor Caldwell are no doubt now well known to the medical profession through the numerous biographical notices which have appeared, especially those by the late Professor Lunsford P. Yandell, M. D., in Lindley's Medical Annals of Tennessee, and as amplified in the Transactions of the Kentucky State Medical Society in its twenty-first annual session in 1876, and other published sketches. But it may also be studied in his somewhat unfortunate Autobiography, which was published in Philadelphia in 1855, two years after his death, edited by the sister of his widow, Miss Harriet W. Warner.
It is said of Titian, that when in his old age he took it into his head to improve some of his best pictures by retouching them, his judicious pupils mixed his paints with olive oil so they would not dry and could be easily washed off again, thus restraining him from marring or destroying his finest works and his fame together. Fortunate would it have been for the venerable Doctor Caldwell had much of this senile production—written only seven or eight years before his death—been canceled by a friendly hand. The too harsh criticisms in which he indulged, which placed some of his late colleagues sharply on the defensive and which also gave them powerful weapons of offense, as well as defense, had then been suppressed!
On Page 315 of this autobiography he characterized the time-honored maxim, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," as "an ill-founded and dangerous precept." Hence Doctor Yandell, whom he had denounced in this work in the most opprobrious terms, felt justified in his notice of this autobiography in his paper on the Medical Literature of Kentucky, published in the Transactions of the Kentucky State Medical Society, 1876, Page 62, in the following terms: "It is not only egotistical and vainglorious beyond anything, I believe, to be found in the English language, but it is at the same time defamatory. The author holds himself up to admiration on all occasions and everywhere from boyhood to old age a very hero of romance." And literal quotations from the unfortunate volume give support to these allegations.
CHARLES CALDWELL, M. D.
Under the provocation of Doctor Caldwell's posthumous attack, Doctor Yandell defended himself and retorted with the weapons which Doctor Caldwell himself had supplied. But, in later years, not long before his death, Doctor Yandell expressed to the writer, in a friendly letter, something like regret that he had not in this case adhered more closely to that maxim in relation to the dead, above quoted, which Doctor Caldwell had condemned as "ill-founded and dangerous." It must be admitted, however, that the provocation was great.[40]