Doctor James Morrison Bruce
Was a son[98] of John Bruce, a Scottish gentleman associated with Colonel James Morrison and Benjamin Gratz in the manufacture of hemp at Lexington, Kentucky, and was born at that place in 1822. After completing a collegiate education, he studied medicine with Doctor Benjamin W. Dudley, taking the degree of M. D. in Transylvania in 1843. He then spent three years in France, studying in the principal hospitals at Paris under the most eminent instructors. In 1846, he returned to Lexington to begin the practice of his profession. He was elected to the chair of Demonstrator of Anatomy in Transylvania Medical Department in 1850, continuing therein until the cessation of the school in 1857. Doctor Bruce's intrinsic merit was fully appreciated by his colleagues, who had great affection for him, but his excessively shrinking nature withheld him from taking the prominent position with the public to which his ability and learning entitled him. In truth, his chief characteristic was his modest, amiable, and retiring disposition. His specialty in medicine was eruptive disease. In the treatment of smallpox his professional brethren conceded him the highest place. For many years he was continuously elected City Physician, and holding this office he died, January 31, 1881, the sudden ending of his useful and kindly life being largely due to the exposure he so constantly and bravely encountered in his visits to the suffering poor during an unusually severe and trying winter. Says a fellow-physician,[99] "It was then that the great and good qualities of our friend and co-laborer, Doctor Bruce, shone pre-eminently. It was at a time when poverty and distress appealed to him that his great-heartedness, his forgetfulness of self, and his proficient medical skill forced itself before that public attention from which at all other times it timidly shrunk." Doctor Bruce married, in 1847, Miss Elizabeth Norton. Of his children Miss Elizabeth Bruce and Mrs. Charlotte B. Davis, of Lexington, survive him.
Doctor Alexander Keith Marshall,
Born February 11, 1808, performed the duties of the chair of Materia Medica in 1856. He had received a classical education from his father, the celebrated Doctor Louis Marshall, of "Buck Pond"; studied medicine with Doctor Ephraim McDowell, and completed his medical course at Transylvania. He was a handsome man, a forcible speaker, a prominent politician and Odd Fellow, and a member of Congress in 1855. He died at the home of his son, Louis, near Lexington, April, 28, 1884.[100]
Benjamin P. Drake, M. D.,
A graduate of Transylvania Medical Department in 1830, occupied the chair of Materia Medica in the last year of the school in 1857.
During the last two years of the Medical Department of Transylvania University the Faculty were: