400 



Rush, Barton, and Woodhouse, filled the four chairs^ to which the 

 organization was limited. 



Shippen, the senior of the Faculty^ and one of the founders of the 

 school, had the three branches of Anatomy, Surgery, and Midwifery, 

 with Wistar for his adjunct. Surgery was not a distinct professor- 

 ship until 1805, when the commanding ability of Physick as a prac- 

 titioner and teacher of surgical art led to the creation of the addi- 

 tional chair. It was not till 1810, after the death of Shippen, that 

 the claims of Midwifery, as an independent practical branch of medi- 

 cine, were admitted. Shippen, whose brilliant social as well as pro- 

 fessional reputation is part of the traditional history of Philadelphia, 

 is described by a student of those days — no friendly critic of the 

 University Faculty, — Caldwell, as "in stature and figure, countenance, 

 and general appearance, and style of manners, one of the most elegant 

 and gentlemanly personages of the times, possessed of an excellent 

 and well-cultivated mind, a polished, and when excited, an impres- 

 sive, if not an eloquent public speaker.'' 



Wistar, then comparatively young, and destined to be the survivor 

 of the Faculty, was the personal favorite of the class. In general 

 education beyond the standard of his day, with a preparatory profes- 

 sional training which an easy fortune had enabled him to prolong at 

 home and abroad, fluent, imaginative, self-possessed, he has probably 

 never been surpassed as a finished and instructive lecturer. 



Barton's reputation in Natural Science gave no little eclat to the 

 school. As a lecturer (in the admission of Caldwell^ who showed 

 much rancor to his memory), " he was eminently instrumental in 

 giving to his branch the respectable rank it holds at present in our 

 Schools of Medicine, Previously to his promotion to the chair of 

 Materia Medica, the lectures delivered from it, in the United States, 

 consisted of very little else than dry details of the names, classes, 

 imputed properties, doses, and modes of preparation, and exhibition 

 of medicinal substances." 



Woodhouse, then recently elected to the chair of Chemistry, was 

 distinguished as an experimental chemist. By Priestley, he was pro- 

 nounced "equal, as an experimenter, to any one he had seen in 

 either England or France." An enthusiast in devotion to analysis, 

 he would doubtless have accomplished something brilliant, but he 

 was cut off by apoplexy at the early age of thirty-eight. 



Rush, however, was beyond cavil the bright star of the school, 

 facile princeps. His theories have disappeared before the light of 

 modern physiological investigation. But his genius made a lasting 



