"Hardly any American physician was more widely known to his countrymen, or more favorably considered abroad, where his writings had carried his name. His personal graces were known to a less extensive circle of admiring friends.... To them it is easy to recall his ever-welcome and gracious presence. On his expanded forehead no one could fail to trace the impress of a large and calm intelligence.... A man so full of life will rarely be found so gentle and quiet in all his ways.... The same qualities which fitted him for a public speaker naturally gave him signal success as a teacher. Had he possessed nothing but his clearness and eloquence of language and elocution, he could hardly have failed to find a popular welcome.... He had a manner at once impressive and pleasing, a lucid order which kept the attention and intelligence of the slowest hearer, and attractions of a personal character always esteemed and beloved by students.... Yet few suspected him of giving utterance in rhythmical shape to his thoughts or feelings. It was only when his failing limbs could bear him no longer, as conscious existence slowly retreated from the palsied nerves, that he revealed himself freely in truest and tenderest form of expression. We knew he was dying by slow degrees, and we heard from him from time to time, or saw him always serene and always hopeful while hope could have a place in his earthly future ... when to the friends he loved there came, as a farewell gift, ... a little book with a few songs in it—songs with his whole warm heart in them—they knew that his hour was come, and their tears fell fast as they read the loving thoughts that he had clothed in words of beauty and melody.
"Among the memorials of departed friendships we treasure the little book of 'songs,' entitled Simple Settings in Verse for Six Portraits from Mr. Dickens' Gallery, Boston, 1855—his last present, as it was his last production."
Doctor Lotan G. Watson,
Of North Carolina, filled the chair of Theory and Practice in Transylvania in the sessions of 1844 and 1845 only. He came highly recommended as a physician of extensive practice of not less than twenty years. "A gentleman of undoubted talents. He has the reputation of bringing to his cases a great affluence of resource and fertility of expedient, regulated by a judgment discriminative and safe. He writes with facility and elegance, and converses with fluency, animation, and impressiveness. He thinks clearly and communicates his ideas with facility and a corresponding clearness." Extract from letter of Senator W. P. Mangum, of North Carolina.
Leonidas M. Lawson, M. D.,
Who filled the chair of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical Department of Transylvania University from 1843 to 1846, inclusive, was born in Nicholas County, Kentucky, September 10, 1812. He had received his medical degree from this same department of Transylvania in 1837.
He was engaged in Cincinnati in private practice, giving clinical instruction in the hospital and editing his recently established medical periodical, The Western Lancet—of which he was sole originator and proprietor—when he was called to the newly established chair of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology in the Transylvania Medical Department, in which he had graduated.