Transcript
The two doctors flipped a coin. After it landed, one doctor went left, the other right. They marched off 10 paces. Then they turned, raised their pistols, and prepared to kill each other.
Normally, of course, doctors save lives. But in 1818, brawls between doctors were alarmingly common. Not all of them ended like this one, in a duel. But one doctor in Philadelphia during that era agonized over how his colleagues, quote, “lived in an almost constant state of warfare.”
The reason for this warfare was simple. Competition. The United States then turned out five times as many doctors per capita as some European countries, so there was fierce competition for patients. Doctors beat each other bloody all the time for stealing business.
But this duel in 1818 was especially noteworthy. That’s because it kicked off a series of events that led to the formation of the most powerful medical society in the United States.
That’s right. The American Medical Association itself traces back to this scuzzy skirmish and the backlash it provoked to find somehow, some way to prevent doctor-on-doctor murder.
This duel began in Transylvania. Not the homeland of Dracula, but Transylvania in east-central Kentucky. It’s a forested region bounded by the Ohio, Kentucky, and Cumberland Rivers.
The Transylvania Seminary opened in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1785. A medical school followed in 1799, the first medical school in the American West. And I know what you’re thinking. Kentucky, the 1700s, attached to a seminary. The school had to be a backwater, right?
Well, think again. Transylvania University was better than most Ivy League schools—truly elite. George Washington and John Adams both donated money to fund it. It had one of the best libraries in the United States, and Thomas Jefferson himself recommended sending students there instead of Harvard. That’s because Transylvania U turned out good, salt-of-the-earth types, Jefferson said, not the, quote, “fanatics and Tories” that Harvard did.
Transylvania Medical School was elite as well, although it had just five faculty members. And unfortunately, two of them—Daniel Drake and Benjamin Dudley, both age 31—absolutely hated each other.
The two had first met in the early 1800s, as medical students in Philadelphia. Daniel Drake was an outsider to the big city, having been raised in a log cabin. He had curly hair and a big nose on a gaunt face.