Youngest child of Thomas T. and Elizabeth Farrar Skillman, born September 4, 1824, at Lexington, Kentucky, was educated in Transylvania University. He spent two or three years in the drug and apothecary business in Lexington, and commenced the study of medicine and surgery in 1844, graduating as Doctor of Medicine, etc., in 1847. He was appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy in the Medical Department of Transylvania University in 1848. In 1851, he was appointed Professor of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology, which position he occupied with skill and success until the close of the Medical College in 1857. Since that time he has devoted himself to the duties of his profession in medicine and surgery, being "one of the most skillful, successful, and accomplished physicians in Kentucky," and "having inherited the admirable qualities of his parents, is one of the most honorable and useful citizens of Lexington."[96]
Since the above was written, the gentle and busy life of this last surviving member of the Transylvania Medical Faculty came suddenly to a close at his home in Lexington, March 21, 1902, at a quarter past four o'clock in the afternoon, apparently without warning. Only two hours previously, handsome and smiling and dignified as usual, he had visited a patient, and he expected in a few hours to resume his professional rounds when the last summons came.
DOCTOR HENRY MARTYN SKILLMAN.
From a Photograph by Mullen.
It is hardly possible for a man to depart this life without leaving an enemy, but if Doctor Skillman, in his fifty-four years of active professional life, had made even a few enemies they hesitated to declare themselves. His own nature was to see good in others; their defects were not made prominent by him. As he spoke no evil, so nothing but good was said of him. But with his amiable, benevolent, compromising disposition there was no trace of weakness. Strict in professional etiquette, immovable in principle, he repelled with gentle but irresistible firmness every effort to shake his integrity. The loveliness of his character and personality is best portrayed in "Luke, the Beloved Physician," a tribute paid, on his death, editorially in the Lexington Herald by Kentucky's favorite orator and statesman, every word of which is as true as it is well-chosen and beautiful. Doctor Skillman held numerous offices of trust; was elected, in 1869, President of Kentucky State Medical Society and, in 1889, the first President of Lexington and Fayette County Medical Society, and was at the time of his death the oldest practicing physician in Lexington, having seen that city grow from eight thousand to thirty thousand inhabitants. It is claimed that he was the first physician to administer chloroform there. For two years during the Civil War he was contract surgeon for the Government.
Doctor Skillman's father, Thomas T. Skillman, a native of New Jersey, came to Lexington in 1809, and soon founded there the largest publishing house in the Mississippi Valley, the name of T. T. Skillman on the title page of a work being a guarantee of its excellence and fitness for the family circle. In 1823, an edition of several thousand copies of the entire Bible was published by Mr. Skillman from stereotype plates sent from New York by the American Bible Society. He founded the Evangelical Recorder and Western Review, afterward edited by Reverend John Breckinridge, the young and talented pastor of "the McChord Church"; also the Western Luminary, in 1824, the first religious paper issued in the West.
Doctor Skillman married, October 30, 1851, Margaret, daughter of Matthew T. Scott, President of the Northern Bank of Kentucky. Of their children only one is living, Henry Martyn Skillman, of the Lexington Security Trust and Safety Vault Company.