Again, on Page 27 of the same Memoir, Doctor Yandell says: "The perfect sincerity with which he held his opinions was evinced by his carrying out his practice in his own case. On one occasion this was near costing him his life. He was seized with intermittent fever, on his farm near Louisville in the fall of 1844, and for several days took his pills—composed of calomel, rhubarb, and aloes—in the confident belief that they would arrest the disease; but the chills continued to recur with an increasing tendency to congestion until at last his case became alarming. His old friend, General Mercer, of Virginia, who happened to be on a visit to him at the time, called on me and gave me an account of his situation, asking me to visit him. Doctor Cooke was reluctant to take quinine, but finally consented and was relieved, and afterward, I believe, used the remedy in his practice."
A characteristic anecdote is recorded of him in Collins' History of Kentucky. "One Sunday morning, waiting on some of his family to get ready for church—the Methodist church, of which he and they were members—he picked up a discourse by the Reverend Doctor Chapman, then Episcopal clergyman of Lexington. The argument for the Old Church of England attracted his attention. He perused and studied it fully, sent for all the available authorities on the subject; studied them with such effect that at once he changed his communion to the Episcopal Church and was ever after a rigid and zealous pillar to that church, and an industrious student of the writings of the theological fathers."
His logic, on which he based his medical theory and practice, is most elaborately set forth in his only large work, already mentioned—A Treatise of Pathology and Therapeutics—and was tersely summed up by a most zealous believer and pupil of his[52] as follows: "If all diseases result from congestion of the vena cava, and if calomel is the best and most reliable remedy, what is the use of applying to any other means?"
Because of its simplicity and its apparently logical basis, the system of Doctor Cooke was very attractive to students of medicine. If true—and they could not doubt it—it was a great new discovery of a royal road to medical practice which avoided all the drudgery over pathology, chemistry, the materia medica and therapeutics of the old school. All ordinary diseases were a unit produced by a common cause, and calomel was the principal panacea!
But alas! the logical system of Doctor Cooke, like many other beautiful and well-laid superstructures, failed in this essential thing—the foundation on which it was raised was not true.
Logical minds too often willingly lay down or accept assumptions, or uncertain facts, as axioms, and are satisfied if the deductions from these are logically accurate and perfect. Doctor Cooke, in a slow and laborious way, took infinite pains to build up his logical superstructure. The writer recollects his illustration of logical connections, by means of certain pieces of wood united by strings; and, notwithstanding his unadorned style and slow and hesitating manner, his students—carried away by his well-known truthfulness, sincerity, and earnest zeal, and incapable of judging for themselves of the validity of his premises—accepted his doctrine as a new revelation and were almost unanimously his ardent followers until experience or more ample knowledge opened their eyes to its faults.
Before he removed from Transylvania School to the new one in Louisville in 1837, severe criticisms of his teachings had been published. Indeed it had begun to be believed by some that these teachings were marring the prosperity of that old college. Soon after his removal to Louisville, we are told by Doctor Yandell, "the current which from the first had set in against his theory and practice grew every year more formidable" until "assailed on all sides, and from within as well as from without, his theory steadily lost ground, his practice grew more unpopular and his influence as a teacher visibly declined from the day he began to lecture in Louisville."[53] So that in 1843 he was, on petition of the students, retired on a three years' pension of two thousand dollars per annum.
Besides the two volumes of his Pathology and Therapeutics he published a small work on Autumnal Diseases, and a number of medical papers in The Transylvania Journal of Medicine, of which he was one of the original editors. The congestive theory of disease had its short day, like many others which have floated like bubbles on the stream of medical progress. We remember it as one of the curiosities of medical literature.[54]