Was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, at "Greenfields," October 6, 1794. He connected himself with the Medical Department of Transylvania University in 1825. He had been called by the Trustees in a previous year to the chair of Materia Medica and Medical Botany, but did not at once accept.
Doctor Short was a most upright, conscientious, modest, undemonstrative gentleman of great delicacy of feeling. He was a most zealous and industrious botanist, and was possessed of artistic tastes and ability.
One of his greatest pleasures was in his extensive herbarium, rich with the native plants of Kentucky collected by himself, as well as with those from other regions obtained by the exchange of specimens with the various botanists of the world, with whom he corresponded individually and extensively. He, in conjunction with Professors H. H. Eaton, H. A. Griswold, and R. Peter, contributed to the Transylvania Journal of Medicine several papers on the plants of Kentucky,[55] and wrote for that periodical several papers on this subject and on medical topics, as well as numerous obituary notices of medical men. He was not the author of any large treatise.
In addition to his notices and catalogues of Kentucky plants he published in the Transylvania Medical Journal:
"Instructions for Gathering and Preservation of Plants in Herbaria."
"Botanical Bibliography." 1835.
"A Brief Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of Cholera Asphyxia." 1835.
"A Sketch of the Progress of Botany in Western America."
In 1845, he wrote "Observations of the Botany of Illinois," published in the Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery.
In the early volumes of the Transylvania Journal also appeared his notices of two remarkable cases which occurred in Lexington. One, of supposed spontaneous combustion of the human body, and the other of paralysis of the kidneys.